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GEOFFREY CHAUCER 



LIVES OF 
GREAT ENGLISH WRITEES 

FROM CHAUCER TO BROWNING 



BT 

WALTER S. HINCHMAN 

Master in English at Groton School 
AND 

FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 

Professor of English in Haverford College, 
author of " The Popular Ballad,'" etc. 




^ ^Mtside-Etes^ 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(^hi iRiterjSiDe pre??, CambriDge 

1908 



LIBSARY of OOPoSKIiSS 
If wo Copies KectJivyJ 

3 V^Q8 



OOHY S. 



^ 







,^ 



COPYRIGHT 1908 BY WALTER S. HINCHMAN AND 
FRANCIS B. GUMMERE 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



>T 



INTRODUCTION 

Not long ago, Mr. Walter S. Hinchman, who had 
been teaching EngKsh at Groton School for five years, 
called my attention to the need of a book which should 
give in succinct but comprehensive form the lives of the 
great English authors. Both for the student, who is 
required to show his real knowledge of these authors in 
examination, and for the general reader, who wishes to 
come at the heart of their work with as little hamper- 
ing as possible from books about books, the main object 
should be first-hand acquaintance with good literature. 
But this first-hand acquaintance is too often delayed, 
clouded, endangered, by the preliminary courses in liter- 
ary history, with their third-hand comments on aestheti- 
cal and critical questions, and their efforts, by phrases 
and formulas, often hopelessly mixed in the reader's 
memory, to impress literary values on minds that have 
not yet encountered literature. Some sort of preparation 
is needed; no one doubts that; but the preparation 
should be direct, inciting, practical. To prepare the 
student or the general reader for the various works 
which he is to undertake, to give him a perspective of 
them, and to rouse his interest in the men who wrote 
them, as well as to save actual time for this first-hand 
reading of them, he needs, not barren formulas and 
catchwords about sesthetic values, but a series of biogra- 
phies of the great writers, shorn of all literary criticism 
save that which serves to characterize the writers and 
give them their due places. These biographies must 



iv INTRODUCTION 

present the author as he lived, note his surroundings, 
and give the pertinent facts of his life. Short transi- 
tional chapters should supply the connections of group 
with group, and create the proper impression of conti- 
nuity in the course of English literature. A brief bibli- 
ography, a chronological table, and a literary map are 
obvious adjuncts to the plan. 

So much for the general purpose of this volume as 
Mr. Hinchman conceived it. As for details of execution, 
to include in one volume the Great Writers of English 
Literature, one must exercise a choice that wiU not 
always go unchallenged. Fielding, greatest of our novel- 
ists, will be noted at once as an omission ; but Fielding 
concerns the student less than many an inferior writer, 
and to make genius and literary prominence the sole test 
would have drawn in Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Herrick, 
and others, who wotJd have stretched the volume to an 
impossible bulk. On the other hand, Ralegh, included 
as a typical Elizabethan, would yield to the superior 
literary claims of many who are not to be found in the 
list. The selection is intended to be representative. 

Mr. Hinchman's ideas, derived from actual experi- 
ence in preparatory English work, seemed sound ; and 
it was determined that they should be embodied in the 
present book. He is responsible not only for the whole 
plan and purpose, but for most of the actual work. 
My own contributions are the lives of Chaucer, Spen- 
ser, Bacon, Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson, Tennyson, 
Thackeray, and Matthew Arnold. 

Feancis B. Gummere. 

Havbkfokd, January, 1908. 



CONTENTS 



FAGB 



Geoffrey Chaucer 1 

Chaucer to Ralegh 19 

Walter Ralegh . . . . . . .22 

Edmund SpenseIj 44 

Francis Bacon 55 

William Shakespeare 69 

The Puritan Age 87 

John Milton 90 

John Buntan 115 

John Dryden 128 

The Eighteenth Century 140 

Daniel Defoe 143 

Jonathan Swift 154 

Joseph Addison 174 

Alexander Pope 191 

Samuel Johnson 210 

Oliver Goldsmith 231 

Edmund Burke 246 

The Age of Romanticism 256 

Robert Burns 259 

Walter Scott 274 

William Wordsworth 292 



vi CONTENTS 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 310 

Charles Lamb 331 

Thomas De Quincey 347 

George Gordon Noel Byron . . . . 361 

Percy Bysshe Shelley 383 

John Keats 399 

The Victorian Age 411 

Thomas Babington Macaulay .... 414 

Thomas Carlyle 428 

John Ruskin . . . . . . . 447 

Matthew Arnold 461 

Charles Dickens 472 

William Makepeace Thackeray .... 486 

George Eliot 497 

Alfred Tennyson 607 

Robert Browning . . . . . . 624 

Appendix 

Chronological Table 542 

Map .649 

Bibliography 651 

Index 657 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Geoffrey Chaucer .... Frontispiece 

Walter Ralegh . . ^ . . . 22 

From the portrait by Zucchero in the National Portrait Gallery 

William Shakespeare 70 

From the Droeshout Portrait, used as the frontispiece of the 
First Folio Edition, 1623. 

Alexander Pope ....... 192 

From the portrait by Jonathan Richardson in 1732, in the posses- 
sion of Mrs. James T. Fields. 

Sir Walter Scott 274 

Inl820. After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.M. A., 
m the Royal Gallery, Windsor Castle. 

Lord Btron . 362 

After the engraving by Finden, from the painting by G. Sanders 
in 1807. 

Thomas Carltle 428 

From the portrait by J. A. McNeill Whistler. 

William Makepeace Thackeray . . . 486 
In 1854. After a drawing by Samuel Laurence. 



GEEAT ETnTGLISH WEITEES 

GEOFFREY CHAUCER 

Geoffrey Chaucer is rightly called the father of 
English poetry. There were English poets before him, 
but the language which they spoke and wrote needs to 
be studied by their descendants of to-day as if it were 
a foreign tongue. The great chasm of the Conquest 
sunders these Old English or Anglo-Saxon poets from 
Chaucer's time ; except in scattered dialects English lit- 
erature had ceased as a national institution. The period 
covered by Chaucer's life witnessed the birth of a new 
English nation and a new English language. Of this 
new nation Chaucer is a worthy representative, and in- 
deed by the last years of his century he was the greatest 
poet in Europe ; by writing in English, moreover, he 
established the traditions of our standard or literary 
speech, which has been, with few changes, the dialect of 
London and the Thames valley. By his persistent use 
of English Chaucer showed his profound appreciation 
of the forces which were at work about him. In 1300 
French had been deliberately chosen as the language 
which the people at large would best understand ; in 
1362, when the poet was barely twenty years of age, a 
famous statute provided that all pleas in the courts 
should be carried on in English, because French was 
no longer known by the average client. By 1385, says 
a chronicler of the time, even the gentry were neglecting 
to teach their children French. Once more, too, national 



2 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

feeling was English, and the wars with France served 
to weld the nation into patriotic unity. The common 
people asserted themselves more and more; Parliament 
acquired new power and significance ; and in many ways 
the England of modern times may be said to date from 
this fourteenth century. 

Chaucer was born in London, perhaps on Thames 
Street, about the year 1340. The name indicates Nor- 
man extraction, but the family had evidently been set- 
tled in England for some time. John Chaucer, the father, 
was a vintner, a wine merchant ; but this calling, like 
that of the great English brewer of modern times, was 
not regarded as a bar to arfetocratic pretensions. In- 
deed, the merchant class generally had pushed to the 
front, and were of great importance in English life. 
While we have no exact information about Chaucer's 
father, we may rightly assume what his station and 
privileges were from the case of another vintner, Lewis 
Johan, a Welshman who acquired the rights of a London 
citizen and whom Professor Kittredge has recently estab- 
lished as a city-friend of the poet himself. It was at 
supper in his house that Henry Scogan read the Moral 
Balade, against foolish waste of time and in praise of 
virtue and godliness, to the Prince of Wales, Shake- 
speare's Prince Hal, and his three brothers, Clarence, 
Bedford, and Gloucester, sons of Henry IV. Professor 
Kittredge infers that Lewis Johan was a vintner, " and 
that he kept a restaurant, a fourteenth-century Sherry's, 
at which young men of the highest rank were accus- 
tomed to dine." We find Johan, along with others, 
presenting a large bill for wine furnished to the King ; 
moreover, like the goldsmiths, wealthy vintners were 
engaged in banking ; and in 1414 Johan obtained for 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 3 

three years exclusive privileges of issuing bills of' ex- 
change for the Court of Kome, the Republic of Venice, 
and elsewhere. In 1422 he" asked to be relieved of the 
office of Master of the Coinage in the tower of London." 
Such a combination of city and court interests we may 
assume for Chaucer's father, accounting thus for the 
poet's range of sympathies. 

Thus Chaucer himself, though not on a footing with 
nobility, was early received at court. It is true that he 
became the aristocratic poet of his time and country, 
leaving to a wandering priest like Langland the task 
of speaking for the common man, the ploughman and 
laborer ; but he was not spoiled by his associations ; 
he was interested in all classes of society, and, like Ten- 
nyson, he warned his readers that to be " descended 
out of old richesse " is not enough for " gentil " men. 
"Whoso," he says, "tries most — 

To do the gentil dedes that he kan, 
Taak hym for the grettest gentil man." 

Allowing for the objective and conventional in these 
lines, one must nevertheless credit Chaucer with their 
sentiment, just as in dealing with the Church he sun- 
ders so rigorously the hypocrites and time-servers from 
the followers of Christ. On the whole, Chaucer's atti- 
tude, while distinctly sympathetic with the higher 
classes, is not that of a man who is fettered by the 
prejudices of his birth. 

The poet's career followed the traditions of his fam- 
ily. His grandfather, Robert le Chaucer, had been a 
collector of the Port of London in 1310, and left an 
estate in lands. The father, besides inheriting this 
property and carrying on his business as a vintner, is 



4 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

twice recorded as discharging public duties, now in 
connection with the corporation of wine-merchants, 
and now in affairs of the Court. He is said to have 
accompanied Edward III to the Continent. Geoffrey 
besran with what we should call domestic service in a 
royal household. The accounts of Elizabeth, wife of 
Prince Lionel, son of Edward III, show that in April, 
1357, an entire suit of clothes, cloak, " red and black 
breeches, and shoes," were bought for Geoffrey Chau- 
cer, and cost seven shillings, — say about twenty-five 
dollars of our money. From the same source a gift of 
two shillings and sixpence — say about ten dollars — 
was bestowed upon him the next winter in Yorkshire 
"for necessaries at Christmas." 

How or where he was educated is not a matter of 
record. He was probably taught to translate Latin into 
French, and doubtless learned to use the former lan- 
guage as a living tongue. That he could make mis- 
takes in reading it, several passages in his works bear 
witness, notably in the House of Fame, where "per- 
nicibus alis " is translated by " partridge's wings." His 
knowledge of science, as science was then understood, 
was fairly extensive, and is best shown by his treatise 
on the Astrolabe, written in 1391 for "his little sou 
Lowis." Works like this, of course, could be translated 
in bulk, but there are many scattered references which 
testify to his general reading. While he took on faith 
much that to us seems absurd, he could make fun 
both of scholastic philosophy and of such a treatise 
as Vinesauf's Poetria, a manual of practical poetics. 
Attempts to connect him, now with Oxford, now with 
Cambridge, are idle; like Shakespeare, he probably 
got his best education from the busy life in which he 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 5 

shared, the men of talent and achievement whom he 
met, and, unlike Shakespeare, from his wide and fre- 
quent travels. Records of this busy life have been 
found in abundance, and new discoveries are not out 
of the question. 

Like all young men of his rank, Chaucer took part 
in the war with France, and was made prisoner there 
about the age of nineteen. The King paid a large 
sum toward his ransom. By 1367 he received a yearly 
pension for life, as one of the yeomen of the King's 
chamber. At first he may be supposed to have held 
torches and carried messages, and he is even credited 
with making the King's bed. But he soon rose to more 
dignified service with the rank of squire. All these 
experiences, his stay in France, his taste of war, his 
association with the King, did more for his own literary 
work than anything he may have read. War itself 
was at that time as romantic as war can well be, and, 
so far as the knights and upper classes were concerned, 
was carried on with extraordinary courtesy. Edward III 
was a pattern of the virtues of chivalry, and other mon- 
arehs of the day were not to be outdone, — when the 
Prince of France escaped from his prison in London, 
the old French King thought it incumbent on himself 
to cross the channel and take the fugitive's place. 
Even the humbler men-at-arms caught the infection, 
and one would like to think that some ballad of the 
Cheviot fight, or of Otterburne, reached the ears of 
Chaucer. His two knights, Palamon and Arcite, who 
fight each other for their lady-love, are not to be out- 
done in generous and chivalric conduct by the Percy 
and the Douglas themselves. Arcite, fully armed, finds 
Ms rival helpless and without weapon, but will not take 



6 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

this foul advantage, j)romising instead to bring fighting 
gear for battle on the morrow, and bidding his oppo- 
nent to " choose the best, and leave the worst for me." 
It was doubtless some humble singer of Chaucer's own 
day who made the stanza about Percy's noble sorrow : 

" The Perse leanyde on his brande, 
And sawe the Duglas de ; 
He tooke the dede mane by the hande, 
And sayd, ' Wo ys me for the ! ' " 

It is well to remember that Chaucer could breathe this 
•spirit in English air under Edward III, and to think 
how different his inspiration would have been from the 
brutal and degenerate times of Edward IV, a century 
later. The gallery of portraits in the Prologue to the 
Canterhiiry Tales not only affords a view of the actual 
life which Chaucer led, and of the men and women 
whom he daily met, but gives us some insight into the 
tastes and preferences of the poet himself. The knight is 
Chaucer's ideal man in high place ; he loves " chivalrie, 

" trouthe and honour, fredom and courteisie." 

He fights in far-off lands, now for some worthy master 
and now for the Clu-istian faith. He is kind and consider- 
ate to lowly folk as well as to his peers, and in his bear- 
ing " meek as a maid." His horse and weapons must 
be of the best, but his dress is plain. To this pattern of 
virtue the poet bows with unalloyed respect, and pays 
compliments as sincere, if more familiar, to the squire. 
The yeoman is praised as a good archer and forester ; 
the prioress comes in for a little harmless satire, but 
holds her own in courtesy and refinement. The monk, 
another aristocrat, has to feel the real sting of the lash, 
and so has the begging friar. Towards the merchant 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 7 

Chaucer is somewhat too curt, if not contemptuous, 
forgetting his name. The lawyer and the doctor are 
lightly touched ; the shipman is called a good fellow and 
shown to be a pirate. The Oxford scholar gets Chau- 
cer's sincerest and finest tribute of praise. The franklin, 
or country squire, is treated as an epicure ; the parson 
and his humble brother the ploughman are nobly por- 
trayed in his most sympathetic vein. He jfinds vulgarity 
interesting in the Wife of Bath and in the miller, and 
shows more actual dislike, sturdy Englishman as he is, 
for the summoner and for the pardoner, tools for the 
meanest functions of the Church, than for any one else. 
Amid these various touches of reverence, sympathy, tol- 
erance, disdain, nothing is more striking than Chaucer's 
appreciation of humble life. Thus in one of the Tales 
we- find the description of a carter, first swearing at his 
horses as they pull in vain at their load, and then prais- 
ing them for the final and triumphant struggle. 

After serving as page and soldier, Chaucer seems to 
have been employed mainly in court affairs, and when 
he was over thirty he was intrusted with diplomatic 
errands. Beginning with missions to neighboring coun- 
tries like Flanders, he was at last sent to Italy. Here 
he came in contact with the best learning and the 
noblest literature of the time. Whether he met Petrarch 
and Boccaccio cannot now be known, though it was< 
entirely possible for Chaucer to have met them both ; 
and as the English poet had already made some repu- 
tation on the Continent, there is no reason why one 
shordd not fancy the great humanist Petrarch convers- 
ing with his far-come visitor at Padua in 1373. Chau- 
cer's tribute to Petrarch at the beginning of the Clerks 
Tale is couched in terms of the highest eulogy, but 



8 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

neither implies nor disavows the assumption of personal 
friendship. His stay in Italy was not long ; but he 
made more than one visit, and came to be master of the 
language. He learned to admire and use the poems of 
Dante, whose influence is to be traced in the House 
of Fame and elsewhere, and especially of Boccaccio, 
from whom he paraphrased and adapted some of his 
longest and best poems. 

Chaucer was an adlierent of John of Gaunt, Duke 
of Lancaster, ambitious younger son of Edward HI, 
and there seems to be good ground for assuming closer 
relations between the two. As early as 1366 the poet 
was probably married to one Philippa, a lady of the 
Queen's chamber, who then received a pension for life. 
It seems fairly certain that she was the sister of Kath- 
arine Swinf ord, who had been governess to John of 
Gaunt's daughters, and whom the Duke finally married 
as his third wife. In any case Chaucer was bound by 
BO ordinary ties to this prince, and the connection 
must explain many of the favors he received from the 
court as well as the renewal of bounty which came to him 
so promptly with the accession of Henry IV, the Duke 
of Lancaster's son. One of the earliest poems which 
Chaucer wrote, The Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, 
is an elegy on the Duke's first wife, who died in 1369. 
•It shows careful study of French models, but is not 
without its own force and beauty, though there is no 
sign of the qualities developed in Chaucer's later work. 
Another poem, written about this time. The Com- 
pleynt unto Pite^ which passes as the poet's first origi- 
nal work, and is written in the so-called Chaucerian 
stanza, is regarded by many scholars as an expression 
of unrequited love, and is supposed to be " founded on 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 9 

fact." However this may be, Chaucer was certainly mar- 
ried and was certainly of the party of John of Gaunt. In 
our own day such work as he did on the Duke's behalf 
would be called political, and we are not surprised to 
find that the poet's fortunes rose and fell with his chief. 
Like modern politicians, too, Chaucer received important 
appointments besides his diplomatic work. He was 
Comptroller of the Customs, and for a long time worked 
hard at this and other duties. In one of the passages in 
his poems which count as autobiographical he tells how 
strenuous was his official life, how tired the evening 
found him, and how little leisure he had to devote to 
his favorite books. He is so busy, says the eagle in the 
House of Fame to the poet, — 

" That tlier no tj'dyng cometh to thee, 
But of thy verray neyghebores, 
That dwellen almost at thy dores, 
Thou herest neither that ne this ; 
For when thy labour doon al is, 
And hast y-maad thy rekenynges. 
In stede of reste and newe thynges, 
Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon, 
And, also domb as any stoon. 
Thou sittest at another boke, 
Til fully daswed ^ is thy looke, 
And lyvest thus as an heremyte,^ 
Although thyu abstyneuce is lyte." ^ 

In other words, he was an industrious official and a 
diligent student, — for it must be remembered that 
poetry and learning were nearer neighbors then than 
now, — and he was fond of good living. We shall see 
that he describes himself elsewhere as distinctly cor- 
pulent. He could not complain, however, of any lack 
of compensation. From the King he had the grant of a 
1 Dazed. 2 Hermit. 3 Little. 



10 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

pitcher o£ wine daily ; after three years of this Isounty 
he contrived to have it exchanged for a second pension. 
In 1374 another pension came to him from John of 
Gaunt, and in the next year he was made guardian of 
the estates of two minors, a profitable office at that 
time. Later he was again engaged in diplomatic mis- 
sions abroad, in Flanders, in France, and in Italy. This 
brings him to his fortieth year, and for six years more 
his prosperity continued, although there is no record 
of foreign travel. He obtained another appointment as 
Comptroller, and was allowed to have his work done by 
deputy in both offices. Moreover he seems to have em- 
ployed an amanuensis for his literary work ; but this 
luxury was not without its drawbacks. The scribe made 
frequent mistakes in taking down the master's words : 

"Adam Scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle 
Boece or Troylus for to writen newe, 
Under thy long lokkes thou most have the sealle ^ 
But ^ after my making ^ thou write more trewe. 
So oft a day I mot thy werk renewe, 
Hit to correcte and eek to rubbe and scrape ; 
And al is through thy negligence and rape." * 

The Boece to which the poet refers is his transla- 
tion of the Consolation of Philosophy, by Boethius, 
perhaps the most popular book of the Middle Ages. 
Before Chaucer King Alfred had translated it into 
Anglo-Saxon. Chaucer's knowledge of Latin was not 
profound enough to make him free of a French trans- 
lation already published, or to save him from some bad 
mistakes. The Troylus we shall presently consider. 

Through all these years of prosperity, which cul- 
minated in 1386, when the poet was made member 

1 Seal). ^ Unless. 

^ According to my composition. * Hurry. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 11 

of Parliament for Kent, Chaucer lived in lodgings 
granted him by the city in the tower over Aldgate, 
and here he must have written some of his best known 
works. In his younger days his poetry seems to have 
been nearer those French models which were still the 
favorite literature of the court and higher classes 
generally in England. He had translated that great 
mediaeval allegory, the Romaunt of the Hose, and had 
written poems like the Boke of the Duchesse. While 
it is perhaps too much to speak of an Italian period, it 
is certain that Italian poetry exercised a great influ- 
ence on his more mature work. The House of Fame 
owes much to Dante, and Troilus and Criseyde, 
though full of vital original work, is taken from Boc- 
caccio's Filostrato. In some respects this is Chaucer's 
masterpiece. In any case it combines the best traditions 
and culture of Italy with the more serious standards of 
the new English life. 

The last twenty years of Chaucer's life seem to have 
been spent mainly in England; and again, though it is 
hardly fair to speak of an English period as contrasted 
with the Italian and the French, it is certain that 
Chaucer now planned his Canterhury Tales and wrote 
that prologue which gives him his best claim upon our 
remembrance. This is wholly English in its character 
and conception. Boccaccio gathered his ladies and gen- 
tlemen together in the Florentine villa and let them tell 
their charming tales; but there is neither character in 
the description of the group nor fitness in the relation 
between the tale and its teller. The pilgrims, twenty- 
nine in number, not only represent all sorts and con- 
ditions of English life at the time, but stand out in 
sharpest outline as individuals, and the tale in each 



12 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

case fits its narrator. The prologue was composed in 
Chaucer's later life, perhaps about the year 1387. 
Some of the actual tales were doubtless written with the 
Canterbury idea in mind, but it is certain that others 
were older poems which the author revised for the pur- 
pose. The plan was not half carried out ; there were to 
be two tales for each pilgrim on the way to Becket's 
shrine at Canterbury, and two on the return. But for 
such tales as we have and for the glimpses at that pil- 
grim company, now in the Tabard Inn and now riding 
by Rochester and Sittingbourne, or by the mysterious 
Bob-up-and-Down, under Blee forest, we may be thankful 
enough. So fresh and bright are these glimpses that one 
feels sure Chaucer must have made the journey himself. 
Another considerable poem of this period is the 
unfinished Legende of Good Women, in which he pro- 
fesses to atone for some of his satire against the sex. 
The prologue to this poem exists in two versions and 
contains passages which have been repeatedly quoted 
as autobiographical. Nothing, says the writer, can take 
him from his books, save only when the month of May 
comes with its birds and flowers. Then — 

" Farewel my boke and ray devocion ! " 

He goes on to speak of his worship of the daisy. Prob- 
ably the passage just quoted is true enough for Chau- 
cer's case; but the praise of the daisy, along with other 
parts of this prologue, is taken directly from the French. 
In spite of Chaucer's official duties and the studious 
habits which he professed, he must have taken part in 
the pursuits and diversions of his class. What some of 
these diversions were may be gathered from the numer- 
ous allusions to the contest for excellence between the 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 13 

Flower and the Leaf; indeed a later poem under that 
title was long attributed to Chaucer himself. The poet, 
in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women, says 
that he has not undertaken to write poetry on behalf of 
the Leaf against the Flower or for the Flower against 
the Leaf; but it is certain that "English court society, 
in the time of Richard II, entertained itself by divid- 
ing into two amorous orders — the Leaf and the Flower 
— and by discussing, no doubt with an abundance of 
allegorical imagery, the comparative excellence of those 
two emblems or of the qualities they typified." It is 
supposed "that the two orders sometimes appeared in 
force, each member bedecked with the symbol to which 
he or she had sworn allegiance." One of the French 
poets, Deschamps, in a charming little poem, names 
Philippa of Lancaster as heading the faction of the 
Flower. Another poem by the same writer, sent along 
with certain of his works to the English poet, not only 
praises Chaucer as the great translator but mentions 
an Englishman, " presumably a friend of both poets," 
about whom much is known and whose story throws 
considerable light on the ways of Chaucer himself.^ If 
this friendship be established, there is great probability 
that Chaucer must have taken his side in a far more 
serious contest, and supported, along with John of 
Gaunt, the followers of Wyclif against the orthodox 
party of Rome. It is usual to accept Chaucer as a good 
churchman, in spite of his satire, and to reject the insin- 
uation that he was a Lollard ; and if his works alone 
decided the question, there would be no quarrel with 
this conclusion. But John of Gaunt was an ardent 

^ These facts are taken from an interesting paper by Professor Kit- 
tredge, " Chaucer and Some of his Friends," Modern Philology, I, 1. 



14 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

defender of Wyclif ; Chaucer was of the Duke's party ; 
and the life of Chaucer's supposed friend Clifford adds 
weight to this evidence for the poet's sympathy with 
reform. It seems probable that he was Sir Lewis Clif- 
ford, somewhat older than Chaucer and a member of the 
household of the Black Prince. Like the Duke, he was 
a patron and protector of the Lollards. Froissart praises 
him as a valiant knight for his jousting in a tourna- 
ment near Calais; and besides this he was active in 
diplomatic and domestic affairs. Very interesting is his 
repentance and the recanting of the Wyclif heresy. In 
his death-bed will he calls himself God's traitor, and 
wishes to be buried in the farthest corner of the church- 
yard. The story of Chaucer's own death-bed repentance, 
told by Thomas Gascoigne, should not be rejected, 
thinks Professor Kittredge, without some consideration 
of "this unquestionably authentic document, which ex- 
presses the last wishes of a very gallant and accomplished 
gentleman." It is further suggested that Chaucer's son, 
" litell Lowis," was named after this Sir Lewis Clifford. 
Such are the fleeting glimpses that may be obtained of 
Chaucer's amusements as well as of the friendships and 
sterner duties to which his position called him. , 

In much clearer light stand Chaucer's literary friends 
and the disciples who carried on his poetic work when 
he was gone. The moral Gower, who composed poetry 
in three languages, a man of wealth and position, was 
chosen by Chaucer as one of his two representatives 
while he was abroad on diplomatic service in 1378. To 
him and to the " philosophical Strode," another friend 
distinguished for his learning, Chaucer dedicates the 
Troilus. Gower, who outlived Chaucer eight years, 
pays a compliment in the Confessio Amantis, his long 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 15 

English poem, to Chaucer as the disciple and poet of 
Venus herself, for whose sake he has made " dittees " and 
" songes glade," with which the whole land is filled. 
Thomas Hoccleve, who, with John Lydgate, tried to 
continue Chaucer's work, must have been about thirty 
years old when his master died. His well-known lament 
is in a singularly affectionate as well as reverent vein. 
To this disciple the dead poet is not only " flower of 
eloquence," " universal father in science, " "this land's 
very treasure and WcAesse," TuUy for. rhetoric, Aris- 
totle for philosophy, and Virgil in poetry, but also the 
friend and the patron. 

" Alasse ! my fadir fro the worlde is goo, 
My worthi maister Chaucer, hym I mene ! 
Be thou advoket for hym, Hevenes Quene ! " 

Chaucer had good need of friends In the latter part 
of his life, not to praise his poetry, but to prop his 
tottering fortunes. 1386 has been noted as the time 
when his prosperity was at its height ; but his party 
soon went out of power, and he began to lose his ap- 
pointments. He gave up his house, and sold two of his 
pensions for ready money. To crown his misfortunes, 
in 1390 he was twice the victim of highwkymen, who 
robbed him of the King's money. The kind of friend 
in need for him was a friend at court ; and such was 
Henry Scogan, who, as we have already seen, was in 
favor under Henry IV and deemed worthy to read a 
moral ballad to the young princes ; at this earlier date 
he is asked to say a good word to Richard II : — 

" Scogan, that knelest at the stremes hede 
Of grace, of alle honour, and worthynesse ! 
In th' ende of which stream I am dull as dede, 



16 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Forgete ^ in solitarie wildernesse ; 

Yet, Scogaii, theuke on Tullius kyndenesse; 

Mjnne ^ thy friend ther it may fructifye." 

This must have been in 1393 ; the " end of the stream " 
means Chaucer's enforced residence near Woolwich, - 
while the " stream's head " is the court at Windsor. 
Another poem of this kind, and probably the last that 
we have of Chaucer's composition, was addressed to 
the friendship of royalty itself. Henry IV, who took 
the kingdom from his cousin Richard in 1399, was the 
son of Chaucer's old patron John of Gaunt. To him 
the poet sends The Conipleynt of Chaucer to his Purse. 
This purse Chaucer calls his dear lady, is sorry that it 
is so light, and unless it be once more heavy, he must 
die. He yearns to hear the blissful clink within and to 
see again the gorgeous yellow of the coin. He is shaved, 
he says, as close as a friar. With this last flicker of his 
humor goes a very pathetic envoy to the king, whom he 
calls Conqueror of Albion and Ruler both by his descent 
and free election. The answer seems to have been 
prompt, for a new pension was assigned to him in Oc- 
tober, 1399. He leased a house in the garden of St. 
Mary's chapel at Westminster, and for a scant year 
enjoyed his new prosperity. On October 25, 1400, he 
died and was buried in Westminster Abbey, first of the 
long line who have made the Poets' Corner famous. 

As for his personal appearance, we have not only his 
humorous description of himself when his turn comes 
to narrate in the Canterbury Pilgrim throng, but the 
portrait which Hoccleve had painted in the manuscript 
of that poem from which we have already quoted lines of 
eulogy and affection. Dr. Furnivall describes the face as 

^ Forgotten. - Make mention of. 



GEOFFREY CHAUCER 17 

" wise and tender, full of a sweet and kindly sadness 
at first sight, but with much honhomie in it on a 
further look, and with deep-set far-looking gray eyes." 
The moustache is gray, the hair shows white under the 
black hood ; "two tufts of white beard are on the chin." 
In the Tales Chaucer is described by Harry Bailey 
the host as shaped in the waist like himself, that is, a 
very fat man ; the poet, moreover, " semeth elvyssh by 
his contenaunce," in other words, is shy, or like a stran- 
ger, in his general bearing, and abstains from familiar 
talk with the other pilgrims. Portrait and description 
agree with the character which Chaucer has impressed 
upon his poetic work. He is above all an observer of 
men and their ways, an interested, if reticent, specta- 
tor of the life about him. He is quite contented with the 
spectacle and has no mind to peer beyond it into those 
mysteries in which poets like Milton delight. He takes 
his stories, his ideas, from the stock of mediaeval litera- 
ture, borrowing at will, as was the custom in those days. 
But his shrewd observations of human nature, his 
kindly tolerance, and above all his humor, are his own. 
In a very garrulous age, when long-winded romances 
and interminable descriptions were the fashion, he con- 
trives to be terse and to the point. No English poet 
has held so closely to the language »f common life. 

Chaucer combines the modern and the mediaeval in what 
seems to be a startling contrast, until one reflects upon 
the peculiar conditions of his time. All the traditions 
of his day were of the Middle Ages, but new ideas and 
new ideals were in the air. Like Petrarch, he could say 
of himself that he was set like a sentinel on the confines 
of two ages and looked both forward and back. He died 
on the eve of a long and wasting civil war, in which the 



18 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

literary life in England sank to its lowest ebb ; and for 
a century he remained a pattern to be imitated indeed, 
but in a hopelessly distant and inferior way. Father of 
English poetry he remained, no less to Spenser and to 
Dryden than to Hoccleve himself. To the last-named he 
was " the first fyndere of our faire langage ; " to Spenser 
he was " Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled ; " to 
Dryden he was " God's Plenty ; " and so great a poet 
as Keats was content to " stammer where old Chaucer 
used to sing." 



CHAUCER TO RALEGH 

The fourteenth century in English literature means 
for most readers Chaucer and Chaucer alone. It was, 
however, marked by great productivity, and by poetic 
achievements which remain unknown to modern times, 
mainly because they were confined, as regards expression, 
to remote dialects or, as regards their subject, to themes 
in which there is scant interest to-day. One of the best 
of English romances was written in the North of Eng- 
land in Chaucer's time, and can be matched by an al- 
legorical poem, the Pearly striking for its pathos and 
beautiful in its style. Other religious poetry could be 
cited of a powef seldom rivaled in the whole reach of 
our literature. Popular verse, too, must have flourished 
in notable degree ; no better narrative can be found 
anywhere than in the Robin Hood cycle, which came to 
perfection in the fourteenth century. Lyric, again, was 
in full flower ; but to all this richness and poetic activity 
we are wont to shut our eyes and consider Chaucer alone. 
It is true that with his death, in 1400, there is an abrupt 
decline, so far as those literary traditions are concerned 
which were formed in London and Oxford and have 
continued down to the present time as national litera- 
ture in contrast to the literature of the various dialects. 
Chaucer's own disciples were ridiculously inadequate; 
and before three decades of the new century had elapsed 
the Wars of the Roses, with their resulting barbarism, 
drove poetry from court and palace into the fields. The 



20 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

real succession of English literature for this time must he 
sought in Scotland, and it was not until the comparative 
quiet under Henry VIII that the old traditions asserted 
themselves on„English soil. 

Meanwhile the fifteenth century is not without its 
poetry, though we must go afield to find it. Mr. Pollard 
has pointed out that English poetry could not be dead 
in times that produced deep and sincere religious verse, 
" such a dramatic lyric " as the Nut-Brown Maid, such 
Christmas carols as are found in a manuscript at Balliol 
College, and some of the miracle plays and moralities. 
Morever, two events of supreme importance mark this 
period of transition, — the English Bible is advancing 
on its sure way to the hearts of the people, and the 
printing-press is beginning its career. Add to these 
innovations such tremendous changes as the Reforma- 
tion, the New Learning, the discovery of America, — 
above all the new attitude of men's minds toward 
life itself, and one sees that " transition" is a word 
powerless to express the change from the time of Chau- 
cer to the time of Ralegh. Separated from Chaucer 
by an interval of time not much greater than that 
which separates us from Dr. Johnson, the men of Ra- 
legh's day looked back on Chaucer through changes 
in language, changes in thought, and still more in 
the habit of thought, which baffled any attempt at 
connection. For us, Dr. Johnson lived but yesterday ; 
for the Elizabethan, Chaucer was a dim and venerable, 
only half understood, figure of the remote literary past. 
Spenser, as we shall see, affected to follow him, but 
this was very much as Virgil followed Homer. To all 
intents and purposes, therefore, we begin English lit- 
erature anew with the poets at the court of Heniy VIII ; 



CHAUCER TO RALEGH 21 

and TotteVs Miscellany, which contained the " Songs 
and Sonnets by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir 
Thomas Wyatt the elder, Nicholas Grimald, and un- 
certain authors," appearing in its first edition in June, 
1557, may be taken as the first milestone on the new 
road. 



WALTER RALEGH 

As a martyr Ralegh was popular with the immediately 
succeeding generation ; but the romantic glamor which 
has grown about his name in more modern times is 
perhaps chiefly due to his adventurous spirit ; he is 
Ralegh the sea-captain and explorer. Even in the 
sixteenth century there must have been a fine atmo- 
sphere of romance about those fearless Elizabethan 
sea-dogs, Ralegh, Drake, Hawkins, Grenville, and the 
Gilberts. Pirates they were for the most part, but 
courageous loyal Englishmen too, with honor for good 
Queen Bess and unquenchable hatred for Popery and 
Spain; and they deserve a conspicuous place in the 
annals of their vigorous age, for more than anything 
they typify its daring spirit, its lust for gain, its un- 
conquerable energy, and its splendid achievements. 

Yet these brave sea-captains, however typical, pre- 
sent a very small feature of a myriad-sided age. Ralegh 
was of them, but he was more than they. He repre- 
sents in his brilliant, kaleidoscopic existence, more com- 
pletely than any of his contemporaries, the versatility 
of his time. As a statesman he rivaled Cecil ; as a 
courtier, Leicester and Essex ; he commanded success- 
fully on land and sea, and was sometimes called the 
" scourge of Spain ; " he was an expert on naval war- 
fare, seaport fortifications, and ship-building ; he organ- 
ized, financed, and conducted colonization; he sat in 
Parliament for seventeen years ; he erected splendid 
establishments ; he studied and practiced chemistry and 




WALTER RALEGH 

From the Zucchero portrait in the National Portrait Gallery 



WALTER RALEGH 23 

agriculture ; with a careless mastery he wrote poetry- 
surpassed only by a few ; his moral reflections are pale 
only beside Bacon's; his History of the World was 
the inspiration of a century ; in his trial he showed an 
intimate knowledge of the law ; in his death he was 
calm and heroic ; and his memory was a guiding star 
to Eliot, Hampden, and Pym. Defeat and despair he 
knew not ; he could conceive and execute the exploits 
of a dozen men, — in his own words, he could " toil 
terribly." 

His versatility, in fact, was his ruin. Men feared 
his indomitable will and hated him for his ability and 
easy success. He was unable, moreover, so to give 
himseK up to a single project that he achieved final 
results in any one thing. In his many purposes it is 
indeed hard to find a paramount interest, but there 
seems on the whole to have burned most deeply and 
lasted longest in his heart a consuming hatred of Spain 
and a passion to secure English dominion in the New 
World. He was literally an Elizabethan ; from the 
moment of James's accession he ceased to thrive. 

The date of Ralegh's birth is uncertain. It has long 
been supposed 1552, but if the age given on various 
portraits be correct, it may have been 1553 or 1554. 
He was born in his father's farmhouse, Hayes Bar- 
ton, in the parish of East Budleigh, Devon. Ralegh's 
father, also Walter Ralegh, although of the gentleman 
class and a landholder, was by no means a conspicuous 
figure. The mother, however, was a notable person. 
A Champemoun by birth, the third wife of Walter 
Ralegh senior, she had previously been the wife of Otho 
Gilbert and the mother of those stalwart sons, John, 
Humphrey, and Adrian. 



24 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Very little is known of the first twenty-five years 
of Ralegh's life. It is a fair conjecture that the ardent 
Protestantism of his father, together with a boyhood in 
Mary's reign, did much to inspire that hatred for Pop- 
ery which characterized the son's life. His mother, a 
Catholic, Foxe tells in his Booh of Martyrs, had one 
time visited Exeter Gaol to comfort and convert the 
prisoners ; but she returned convinced of the spiritual 
fortitude of the poor creatures, especially of one Agnes 
Prest, much to the delight of her husband. Such inci- 
dents make indelible impressions on listening children. 

Ralegh is known to have attended Oriel College, 
Oxford, where he became, says Anthony a Wood, " the 
ornament of the juniors, and was worthily esteemed a 
proficient in oratory and philosophy." This was prob- 
ably before 1569, for it is known that he was abroad 
most of that year : in his History he speaks of himself 
as one of the hundred volunteers to help the French 
Huguenots and as an eye-witness at the retreat after 
Moncontour. On the rolls of the Middle Temple, Lon- 
don, there is an entry, dated February 27, 1575, which 
leaves no doubt that Ralegh intended to study law. To 
Gascoigne's Steele Glasse (1576), moreover, there 
are prefixed some verses by " Walter Rawely of the 
Middle Temple." Yet it is just possible that from 1575 
to 1578 he was in the Low Countries with Sir John 
Norris's force under the Prince of Orange. In 1578 he 
took a command in his half-brother Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert's expedition to discover a northwest passage ; 
there is some doubt whether he actually went, but it is 
certain that he was fired with the spirit of the enterprise 
and was already interested in schemes of exploration. 
During the next two years Ralegh is known to have 



WALTER RALEGH 25 

been about court. Here, it is fair to assume, he learned 
all sides of the courtier's trade. He was well acquainted, 
for instance, with such important persons as Leicester 
and Burleigh ; and he was committed, as another in- 
stance, to Fleet Prison for six days for brawling with 
Sir Thomas Per^ot. Another story of these days tells 
how in a tavern he sealed up the mouth of Charles 
Chester, a noisy fellow, by tying the moustache and 
beard together. " For there is a great laugh in Ralegh's 
heart," comments Charles Kingsley, " a genial contempt 
of asses ; and one that will make him enemies here- 
after : perhaps shorten his days." 

But Ralegh's career really began in 1580. He then 
accepted the captaincy of one hundred foot to fight the 
insurgents of Munster, in Ireland. In the prosecution 
of his duty he was relentlessly cruel. When Limerick 
capitulated, he and Macworth put to the sword, it is 
said, four hundred Spaniards and Italians, — a "great 
slaughter," comments John Hooker. All the Irish men 
and some Irish women were hanged. In a letter to 
Walsingham he complained of the mildness of his 
superior's rule. " I would to God," he says, " that 
he looked more to the service of Sir Humphrey Gil- 
bert." What that service was may be guessed from 
a letter of Sir Humphrey's to Sir Henry Sidney, in 
which he says if a castle or fort " would not presently 
yield it, I would not thereafter take it of their gift, but 
won it perforce . . . putting man, woman, and child of 
them to the sword." This brutality finds some explana- 
tion in the fact that the Irish were conventionally 
treated as pagans or as Catholics in league with Spain. 
Ireland, Ralegh said with an Elizabethan flourish, was 
*' a common woe, rather than a commonweal." 



26 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

There are many tales of Ralegh's brilliant, daring 
feats as an officer in Ireland. Once he risked his life to 
save a wounded soldier crossing a ford ; with pistols 
and quarterstaff he fought one against twenty until the 
injured man had escaped. Finally he was given, with 
Morgan and Piers, the lieutenancy of Munster ; but in 
December, 1581, his company was paid and disbanded, 
and he returned to England. 

Soon after this Ralegh came into royal favor. It is 
not known just how: perhaps by the famous cloak in- 
cident, when he spread a garment, the story runs, for 
Elizabeth to tread on in crossing a muddy place. But 
Queen Elizabeth, for all her vanity, was too shrewd a 
person in 1582 to bestow great favor on a mere gallant. 
What is much more likely is that a man of Ralegh's 
parts must have stood head and shoulders above the 
other courtiers. Yet in spite of his polish and wit, he 
still retained with some pride his broad Devon accent 
— as indeed he did through life. He is described as 
being at this time tall, with thick curly hair, beard, and 
moustache, bluish-gray eyes, high forehead, and long 
face. 

Court favor with Ralegh at first meant constant 
duty on various commissions — such as Irish investiga- 
tions and estimates for the repair of Porstmouth forti- 
fications — rather than official positions. In 1584, how- 
ever, he was elected to Parliament as a member for 
Devon; and early the same year he was knighted. The 
following year he succeeded the Earl of Bedford as 
Warden of the Stannaries, or tin-mines, in the West. 
By virtue of this position he commanded the Cornish 
militia and had a claim to the same power in Devon ; 
and soon after, he received the lieutenancy of Cornwall 



WALTER RALEGH 27 

and vice-ad miralship of the two counties. In 1586, how- 
ever, came a more signal honor, the captaincy of the 
yeomen of the guard. During these years of royal favor, 
moreover, Ralegh acquired by grants many confiscated 
lands in England and Ireland, as well as control of wine 
licensing,^ all very lucrative perquisites. As he was a 
true Elizabethan in all things, he now began to vie with 
his favored contemporaries in magnificent living ; he 
spent lavishly on gardens, building, pictures, books, 
and splendid, jeweled clothes. All the while, moreover, 
he kept up his wide interest in study, particularly in 
medicine, chemistry, and letters. He hired Hariot, the 
astronomer mathematician, to teach him, and amanu- 
enses to copy scarce and interesting manuscripts. He is 
found, too, taking the part of the oppressed. There is 
a story of one of his gallant replies : how, upon the 
queen's asking him when he would " cease to be a 
beggar," he answered, " When your Majesty ceases to 
be a benefactor." He had, furthermore, some scheme 
for an " office of address," which both Evelyn and 
Southey take to have been the beginning of the Royal 
Society. 

The most striking of all Sir Walter's activities dur- 
ing these twenty odd years of prosperity were, however, 
his interest in colonization and his warfare against 
Spain. He has been found a prime mover in Sir Hum- 
phrey Gilbert's expedition of 1578. In March, 1584, 
be obtained a patent to hold by homage "remote 
heathen and barbarous lands " which he might discover 
within the next six years. In April, therefore, he sent out 
two captains who landed on the North Carolina coast. 

^ By this patent each Tintner was bound to pay Ralegh one pound 
annually. 



28 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

A year later he dispatched Governor Ralph Lane with 
a colony of 107 under his cousin Sir Richard Grenville. 
But the colonists, losing courage, were taken home a 
year later by Sir Francis Drake, and passed unwit- 
tingly Ralegh's third expedition, again under Grenville. 
In 1587 still another colony was sent out. Ralegh spent 
on the plantation, whiieh he had named Virginia in honor 
of the Queen, altogether about £40,Q00. All four at- 
tempts, however, were failures ; and when twenty 
years later the Jamestown settlement was established, 
no trace of Sir Walter's settlers -was visible. Yet he 
had never given up hope. He continued to aid in other 
expeditions, and, whatever the 'actual results, his zeal 
was the chief cause of English dominion on the North 
American coast. " I shall yet liv.e;" he said in 1603, 
" to see it an English nation." ^ l 

Ralegh had been forbidden by J;ke Queen to conduct 
the Virginia voyages in person. Itul587, however, the 
rise of the Earl of Essex, Leicester's ingratiating step- 
son, brought Ralegh into sufficient disfavor to make 
the court less attractive and thus actually to promote 
more various activities. In the summer of 1588 he was 
given a prominent part in the defense of the southwest 
coast against the Spanish Armada, and during the 
fight he captained a ship. The next year he accompa- 
nied as a volunteer the expedition against Portugal. 

On his return Ralegh found the star of Essex still 
in the ascendant. He accordingly retired to Ireland, 
to look after his Munster estates. During this rustica- 
tion he became familiar with Spenser, secretary to 
Lord Deputy Grey. Spenser showed him parts of the 
Faerie Queen, and dedicated to him the poem Colin 
Clout 's Come Home Again. At this time, too, Ralegh's 



WALTER RALEGH 29 

long poem to Elizabeth, whom he addressed as " Cyn- 
thia," was at least conceived and in part written. Of 
this work, said to have contained fifteen thousand lines, 
the merest fragment is preserved. Many shorter poems, 
some of doubtful authorship, are ascribed to his pen 
at this period, such poems as "The Silent Lover," 
" The Nymph's Reply to the Passionate Shepherd " 
(printed in Walton's Compleat Angler'), " The Lie," 
" The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage," and an " Epitaph 
on Sir Philip Sidney." Yet he was careless of poetic 
fame ; in fact the only poem he really claimed as his is 
the famous " Farewell to the Court." The significant 
thing, however, is that he was treated, by his contempo- 
raries as a poet and that his immediate posterity was 
quite ready to attribute to him, on the slightest evi- 
dence, some of the best anonymous verse of Elizabeth's 
time. 

But such an active spirit could not remain long pip- 
ing ditties in Ireland. He gladly accepted in September, 
1591, a commission as vice-admiral of a fleet, under 
Lord Thomas Howard, to intercept the Spanish plate 
fleet at the Azores. At the last minute his cousin. Sir 
Richard Grenville, was substituted for him. Ralegh's 
heart must have ached at missing the glorious fight 
that followed ; for the Spaniard, getting wind of the 
plan, sent fifty-three towering galleons with their " bat- 
tle-thunder and flame," and Sir Richard fought them 
single-handed in the little Revenge. The following 
November Ralegh published anonymously his Heport 
of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of' the Azores, 
reprinted under his name in the Hakluyt of 1599. Be- 
sides praising the valor and skill of Sir Richard and 
his crew, and exonerating Lord Howard for his escape, 



30 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Ralegh took particular occasion to rouse England to an 
anti-Spanish policy. Spain was soon to learn that Sir 
Richard Grenville's cousin too could fight. 

In May, 1592, Ralegh started in command of an ex- 
pedition against the Spanish in Panama. In support he 
gave ships and a large part of his wealth. He was soon 
overtaken, however, by Sir Martin Frobisher and recalled 
on account of an affair with Elizabeth Throckmorton, one 
of the Queen's maids of honor. That Elizabeth Throck- 
morton, a person of as rare mettle as Sir Walter him- 
self, became his devoted wife is true ; it is also true that 
such irregular affairs were common enough in those 
days of the strange confusion of great virtue and great 
vice. Still, the " Virgin Queen " was in this instance, 
perhaps properly if inconsistently, incensed, and Sir 
Walter was forthwith put in the Brick Tower from June 
to September. He was finally released because he was 
considered the best man in all England to arrange the 
partition of spoil of the Madre de Dios, the " Great 
Carack " brought into Dartmouth by Sir John Burgh 
of the Panama fleet. Other spoilsmen, however, were 
at work, and Ralegh barely cleared expenses in the 
end ; but, better than this, he achieved his ransom 
from prison. He acquired, moreover, by the Queen's 
help, the Sherborne estate, in Dorset, where he now 
lived in semi-banishment from court. He maintained 
as well several London residences, but Sherborne was 
his favorite retreat, and there he studied and planted, 
and planned future voyages, 

Ralegh's unpopularity, however, is not to be wondered 
at. The courtiers, fearful of his extraordinary powers and 
whipped by his sharp tongue, had baited the more flex- 
ible Essex against him. Towards the common people, 



WALTER RALEGH 31 

except his own tried servants, lie was haughty, — " dam- 
nably proud," says Aubrey ; and Henry Howard wrote 
to Cecil of " Rawlie, that in pride exceedeth all men 
alive." His speeches in Parliament, moreover, where 
he sat off and on from 1584 to 1602, were too keen 
and arrogant for the more plodding legislators ; as Mr. 
John Buchan puts it, "he was a firebrand in any 
council-chamber." Self-seeker like the rest of them, 
he was a dreaded antagonist in the feverish race for 
success. 

It is in his exploits on the high seas, then, or in his 
long imprisonment under James, when he escaped the 
petty jealousies of the moment, that Ralegh appears at 
his best. A half-conscious sense of this fact, as well as 
his ceaseless activity and his inborn Devon love of the 
open sea and sky, no doubt kept him so persistently at 
his pursuit of exploration. For after a couple of years 
at Sherborne he was off again on the high seas, this time 
bound for Guiana. 

He first sent out in 1594 an expedition under Cap- 
tain Whiddon, was satisfied of the possibilities in the 
adventure, and himself set sail on February 6, 1595. 
In Guiana he fought the Spaniards, made friends with 
the Indians, and pushed far up the Orinoco. Floods 
forced him to return before he reached the fabled city of 
gold, Manoa, but he was confident of its existence and 
of his future success. The next year he published his in- 
teresting Discovery of Guiana^ crowded with informa- 
tion of all kinds, — the names and customs of various 
tribes, the fruits and resources of the country, minute 
details of topography and geology, and strange experi- 
ences in equatorial waters. England might share, he 
fully believed, the success of Pizarro and Cortez. In 



32 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

1596 he sent out another expedition under Captain 
Keymis, but the Spaniards, who had taken possession 
of San Thome, the town near the mouth of the Orinoco, 
resisted every step. 

The Guiana expedition, though it did not arouse 
Elizabeth's direct sympathy and support, brought Ra- 
legh again into prominence. He urged offense rather 
than defense in the competition with Spain, and accord- 
ingly on June 1, 1596, a proud armament of ninety- 
six English and twenty-four Dutch sail set out from Ply- 
mouth under Essex and Lord Admiral Howard. Ralegh, 
who commanded twenty-two ships, was one of the war- 
council of five to advise the chiefs. In the attack on 
Cadiz there was some hesitation about beginning the 
fight and much manoeuvring for precedence among the 
leaders. Ralegh took the bit in his teeth, forged ahead 
in the Warspright, " resolved to be revenged for the 
Revenge or second her with his own life," captured 
two of the biggest galleons, the St. Matthew and St. 
Andrew, and forced the St. Philip and St. Thomas to 
set fire to themselves. " If any man," he afterward 
wrote, " had a desire to see hell itself, it was there most 
lively figured." A wound kept him from going ashore 
in the sack of Cadiz, but the chief glory of the fight 
was his, as weU as the envy of his rival commanders. 
Again his share of the spoil was slight, but again he 
gained a more valuable prize, complete restoration to 
favor at court. 

The next adventure was the islands voyage, with the 
purpose of seizing the Indian treasure ships at the 
Azores. It was agreed first to attack Fayal. Ralegh 
arrived before the others, saw preparations for resist- 
ance going on, grew impatient, and, after four days of 



WALTER RALEGH 33 

waiting, attacked and won with a handful of marines. 
Essex, soon coming up, was jealous and very wroth at 
Ralegh's presumptuous action, but the affair resulted 
only in a reprimand. Though some prizes were taken, 
the expedition was chiefly a failure. 

Sir Walter's voyages were now over except for the 
last fatal Guiana expedition, twenty years later. Just at 
present he was very active at home: in Parliament, in 
valued counsel to the ministers, in court duties, and in his 
numerous private interests, — study, planting, collect- 
ing, subsidizing semi-piratical enterprises, and living 
splendidly. In 1600 he found a new activity in the 
governorship of Jersey. He had made his potatoes grow 
in Ireland, he had brought mahogany from Guiana, he 
had introduced oranges and tobacco. The last-named 
commodity recalls the well-known story of his immer- 
sion*in spiced ale by a servant who fancied his master 
on fire within. 

The execution of Essex in February, 1601, for a 
conspiracy against the crown, brought Ralegh popular 
dislike at the same time that it added royal favor. He 
had not at first wished the execution of Essex; in fact, 
he had contrived to get along very well with so natural 
an enemy. Towards the end, however, Essex's extrava- 
gant sayings and doings only increased the ill feeling 
between them, and Ralegh came to look on him as an 
inveterate foe. The public, whose idol was the easy-going 
earl, liked to tell many stories of Sir Walter's cold- 
blooded indifference, how, for instance, he smoked a pipe 
as he looked out of the window at Essex's execution. 

At court, however, matters were different. For the 
next two years, with no Essex in the way and Robert 
Cecil, Burleigh's son, on friendly terms, Ralegh stood 



34 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

higher than ever in the Queen's graces. During these 
last days of Elizabeth he was in constant consultation 
at court, he entertained foreign embassies, and he flour- 
ished as a patron of letters. If his institution of the 
fellowship of rare wits presided over by Ben Jonson at 
the Mermaid Tavern be a fact, it must have taken place 
about this time. Ralegh would have been one of the 
choicest in such a gathering. And some, wishing to be- 
lieve that the master-mind and the master-hand of the 
age came together, have fancied that there he knew 
Shakespeare. This period of his life Mr. Stebbing has 
fitly characterized as the " zenith," for with Elizabeth's 
death and the accession of James in 1603, Ralegh lost 
forever his position at court. 

When James came down from Scotland, a swarm of 
sycophants buzzed north to gain his ear. Ralegh was 
among them, but he found the rough Scotsman already 
prejudiced against him. If a story the not over trust- 
worthy Aubrey tells be a fact, Sir Walter lost ground 
steadily. On the King's asserting that he should have 
been able to win the English crown had the nobles 
not accepted him, Ralegh replied, according to Aubrey, 
« Would God that had been put to the trial ! " " Why ? " 
asked James. " Because then," answered the other, " you 
would have known your friends from your foes." 

What precipitated the trouble between James and 
Ralegh was the latter's estrangement from Cecil, and his 
association with Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham. As the 
succession of James approached, Cecil, who mistrusted 
the growing rivalry of Ralegh, had been easily led by 
Henry Howard into treating Sir Walter as an enemy, 
politically at least. Howard, a malignant intriguer, had 
written to James of Ralegh and Cobham, " Hell did never 



WALTER RALEGH 35 

vomit up such a couple," and Cecil's letters to the King 
had been almost as vituperative. To James, however, 
such vilifications were hardly necessary ; he was, as Mr. 
Stebbing puts it, " already incurably prejudiced " against 
Ralegh. 

Sir Walter's association with Cobham added to the 
suspicions of the Kftig and his ministers. The conspir- 
acy of Cobham, a conceited, cowardly spoilsman, was, 
briefly, to establish by intrigue with Spain, through 
one Count Arenberg, minister of the Low Countries, 
the claim of Arabella Stuart to the English throne. 
Spite against James, hope of favor from the new re- 
gime, and a cancerous love of intrigue were undoubt- 
edly Cobham's motives. Of these Ralegh must have 
shared his dissatisfaction, with something of his love 
for intrigue, but it is ludicrous to think of him, " the 
Scourge of Spain," sincerely connected with Spanish 
machinations. Yet Cobham hoped to use his friend's 
sharp wits, talked freely to Ralegh of his purposes, and 
offered him iDribes. There is, however, not one single 
piece of direct evidence that Ralegh accepted pay or 
was actively engaged in the plot. 

The association with Cobham, nevertheless, was sus- 
picious-looking to Cecil, sufficient for the unscrupulous 
Howard, and convincing to the prejudiced James. 
Accordingly in July, 1603, Ralegh was put under 
guard in his own house. He had already been stripped 
of his office of wine licenser and his captaincy of the 
Guard ; now he lost his control of the Stannaries and 
the Jersey governorship. Soon Cobham himself turned 
in his trial on Ralegh, and in an abject attempt to 
save himself actually asserted that Sir Walter had in- 
stigated the dealings with Arenberg. Most of the evi- 



36 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

dence in confirmation of tliis was irrelevant and third 
or fourth hand, but Ralegh was thereupon put into the 
Tower. 

At first the prisoner acted as if convicted before 
tried and foolishly attempted suicide. Here again, 
said his enemies, was confession of guilt. Ealegh later 
repented the rash attempt, which v\^s made, he asserted, 
not from fear, as some alleged, but from a desire to 
deprive his enemies of the unjust confiscation of his 
estates ; he wished to save Sherborne for his wife and 
son. His impulse, whatever else it shows, proves that 
Ralegh had a very correct estimate of the outcome of 
his trial. 

Cobham's feeble attempts to retract his accusations 
were for the most part suppressed. The mass of worth- 
less evidence was marshaled, and on November 17 
Ralegh was brought to trial. In the proceedings, 
which he justly stigmatized as a disgrace to an Eng- 
lish court of justice, nothing conclusive of guilt was 
produced. His one false action, so far as proof goes, 
was to deny having written a letter telling Cobham to 
hold his tongue. This was very significant to his judges ; 
they were incapable of seeing that the letter might have 
been founded on a desire to save Cobham, and the de- 
nial based on a later impulse to save himself when the 
garrulous Cobham had lost all chance. 

The really interesting features of the trial are Ra- 
legh's calm bearing and his encounter with Sir Edward 
Coke, then attorney-general, — a man, Cecil himself 
said, " more peremptory than honest." Coke, in default 
of evidence, resorted to vituperation. Speaking of 
Cobham, he cried, "All he did was by thy instigation, 
thou viper ; for I thou thee, thou traitor ! " " You may 



WALTER RALEGH 37 

call me traitor at your pleasure," replied the prisoner 
calmly, " yet it becomes not a man of virtue or quality 
to do so. But I take comfort in it ; it is all that you 
can do ; for I do not yet hear that you charge me with 
any treason." When Coke later quibbled on a point 
of law, Sir Walter answered, " It is a toy to tell me 
of law ; I defy law. I stand on the facts." Another 
time, when Ralegh had objected to the use of evidence 
derived from " hellish spiders," Coke roared, " Thou 
hast a Spanish heart, and art thyself a spider of hell ! " 

Yet the jury contrived, after a quarter of an hour's 
debate, to find Ralegh guilty of high treason. He was 
sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; but at 
the last moment, when the condemned was already 
on the scaffold, James, with a childish passion for a 
dramatic scene of which he should be the central figure, 
came down with a reprieve, and Ralegh was removed 
to the Tower. The truth was that the king feared on 
such slight evidence to put Ralegh to death. The man's 
bearing during his trial and the absurdity of the pro- 
ceedings had turned popular feeling. A moment before, 
Ralegh had been the best hated man in the kingdom ; 
now he was all but a martyr. 

The prisoner was at first so ill in the Tower that he 
was allowed to remove to a little garden-house, where 
he kept a still for the study of his chemistry. Lady 
Ralegh and their son Walter, now ten years old, were 
permitted to live with him ; and in the Tower a second 
son, Carew, was born, in 1604. Most of Ralegh's con- 
finement was in the " Bloody " Tower. There he had 
a gallery which looked down on the busy wharves, and 
crowds are said to have gathered to catch a glimpse of 
the great man — the jeweled captive of the king. 



38 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

For years attempts were made to establish more 
clearly the prisoner's guilt ; he was suspected of con- 
nection with the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, — in fact, 
of complicity in every new conspiracy. He was indeed 
a man still to be reckoned with. He soon gained the ear 
and support of Anne, James's queen, and of Henry, 
Prince of Wales. " Who but my father," cried Henry, 
" would keep such a bird in a cage ! " The death of 
the prince in 1612 unfortunately put an end to Ralegh's 
chances of a pardon. Yet he never despaired. An irre- 
pressible confidence in the work he had yet to do made 
him cling tenaciously to life and hope. 

This spirit kept him active. Besides his work in 
chemistry, he wrote a great deal. He had ever been a 
large reader ; in fact, he was accustomed to take many 
books on his voyages. Now, in the Tower, he found 
plenty of leisure for further study and a mature judg- 
ment for assorting the omnivorous learning of fifty 
years. Naturally his writings were on a multitude of 
subjects. A mere list of the chief treatises is aston- 
ishing in its variety and scope : The Prerogative of 
Parliaments, The Savoy Marriage, The Discourse of 
the Invention of Ships, The Maxims of State, A Dia- 
logue hetween a Jesuit and a Recusant, The Sceptic, 
A Treatise on the Soul, A Discourse on Tenures 
which were hefore the Conquest, and the History of 
the World. 

The History of the World — entered on the Regis- 
ter of the Stationers' Company April 15, 1611, and 
first printed in 1614 — is of all these prose writings 
incontestably the greatest. Only an Elizabethan could 
have conceived and dared such a heroic undertaking ; 
and the achievement is nothing short of marvelous 



WALTER RALEGH 39 

when it is remembered, that this particular Elizabethan 
was old, in poor health, defeated, in prison. He could 
still "toil terribly." It is said that Ralegh was helped, 
by others in the writing, but at least the conception, 
the supervision, and. the best part of the work were his. 
Of course it was not finished, but it is a monumental 
fragment. In it Ealegh is most consistently at his best ; 
the littlenesses of daily intrigue have fallen away ; for 
pages he speaks with the oracular mastery that few 
have ever genuinely attained. The History would live 
indeed, if for nothing else, for its closing lines, the 
famous apostrophe to Death. Ralegh had run the com- 
plete gamut of mortal experience ; he had enjoyed all 
the " farre-stretched greatnesse " of which he speaks ; 
he had fought for bare existence against a poisoned 
court; and he pronounces these last words with some- 
thing of the tragic intimacy, the deep personal experi- 
ence that Milton had of a lost paradise. More than 
any one he knew life ; and he had veritably seen death 
face to face. " O eloquent, just, and mighty death ! " 
he says, " whom none could advise, thou hast per- 
swaded ; what none hath dared, thou hast done ; and 
whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast 
out of the world and despised : thou hast drawne to- 
gether all the farre-stretched greatnesse, all the pride, 
crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over 
with these two narrow words, Hicjacet" 

Ralegh's release from prison came finally in March, 
1616. Secretary Win wood, who thought well of him 
and who secretly preferred a French to a Spanish alli- 
ance, did much to bring about the King's permission. 
James, who was now strongly inclined to the Spanish 
marriage of his son Charles, saw an excellent chance. 



40 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Spain still feared Ealegh alive — even in prison. So 
did James. Popular opinion had made it increasingly- 
difficult to keep the prisoner quietly immured. Here, 
then, vras a solution : another trip to Guiana meant 
conflict with the Spanish ; Ealegh, who had been urging 
such an expedition, should be sent, with instructions 
not to break the peace with Spain, and the court at 
Madrid, forewarned of the adventure, should make the 
carrying out of such instructions impossible. 

Just before Ralegh's departure French complications 
developed. He had received permission, if not a com- 
mission, from the French Admiralty to land Spanish 
prizes in French ports. A letter of his to a French 
councillor of state regarding cooperation in the Gui- 
ana work was obtained by James ; and the whole packet 
— plans of the voyage, French letter, and explana- 
tions from the King — was sent via Madrid to the 
Spanish governor of Guiana. The cue of the Span- 
iard was of course to resist Ralegh's advance to the 
mine ; then Sir Walter, with his hands tied, must fight 
or fail. To fight would be against the Crown's orders ; 
to fail would prove his scheme a hoax and revive the 
old popular dislike. 

Ralegh, who was ignorant of the fact that San Thome 
was moved so that a conflict would be inevitable, set 
out in hopeful spirits from Plymouth on June 12, 
1617. Ill luck beset the expedition from the start ; 
added to this, the crews were mutinous and incom- 
petent. Arriving off Cape Oyapoco, he sent a party 
under his son Walter, with Keymis as guide, in search 
of the gold mine. He himself stayed at the mouth of 
the river in his flagship, the Destiny, partly to guard 
against Spanish attack, partly on account of ill health. 



WALTER RALEGH 41 

111 his instructions to those setting out he said : " You 
shall find me at Puncto Gallo, dead or alive. And if 
you find not my ships there, you shall find their ashes. 
For I will fire, with the galleons, if it come to ex- 
tremity ; run will I never." The mine expedition fared 
badly. Young Walter fell fighting gallantly in the cap- 
ture of San Thome, where the Spaniards forced a fight ; 
the others turned back disheartened without reaching 
the mine ; and Keymis, overcome by Ralegh's reproof, 
committed suicide. Any chance of a second attempt or 
of piratical attacks on the Mexican fleet was lost by the 
desertion of some of the captains. The forlorn hope had 
failed. Ralegh returned, broken in health and spirit, to 
a satisfied King and a condemning people. 

On arriving again at Plymouth, Sir Walter was im- 
mediately taken into custody. With all the world 
before him and French ports open to him, he had 
not taken the chance to escape. Now, persuaded by his 
wife and a Captain King, he foolishly attempted flight 
to France. Once in the boat, however, he ordered 
return and gave himself up again. But his tenacious 
eagerness for life soon returned. At Salisbury he 
feigned madness and sickness for a week, that he might 
gain time to write his Apology for the Voyage to 
Guiana. At London he made another attempt to 
escape, but was taken by his keeper. Sir Thomas 
Stukely, who accepted bribes and pretended assistance. 

Once more Ralegh stood before the King's Bench. 
The judges, however, were again unable to find sufli- 
cient evidence. The Mexican plate fleet had not been 
attacked, the Spaniards had offered the first resistance 
at San Thome, and the French complication could not 
be proved treasonous. Pardon, however, was another 



42 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

matter. Winwood was dead, and Ealegh found few 
influential friends. James, moreover, bad promised the 
King of Spain a public execution, eitber in Madrid or 
in London; it was clear tbat Ralegb must be a peace- 
offering to Spain. Tbe old cbarges of 1603 were re- 
newed ; Ralegb was found guilty of bigb treason as 
before, and on October 29, 1618, was executed in 
Palace Yard, 

In bis death Ealegh was exalted into the same noble- 
ness that is so pervasive in bis great History. This is a 
significant characteristic in his life ; it is always foimd 
breaking out in great crises, — in Guiana, at Cadiz, in 
bis trial, in prison, on the scaffold ; it, in fact, is what 
gives him tbe right, when the skillfully versatile courtier 
and daring buccaneer seem inadequate, to represent 
most truly of aU. men the " spacious " times of Eliza- 
beth. He must have been in this spirit the night before 
his execution, when he wrote those famous lines : — 

"Even such is time, that takes in trust 
Our youth, our joys, our all we have, 
And pays us but with earth and dust ; 
Who, in the dark and silent grave, 
When we have wandered all our ways, 
Shuts up the story of our days. 
But from this earth, this grave, this dust, 
My God shall raise me up, I trust." 

" He made no more of his death," said Dean Toun- 
son, who administered him the sacrament, "than i£ 
it had been to take a journey." When he was asked 
whether he would lay his head toward the east, he 
answered, " So the heart be right, it is no matter 
which way the head lies." To the executioner's offer to 
blindfold him, he replied, " Think you I fear the 
shadow of the axe, when I fear not itself ? " And 



WALTER RALEGH 43 

when the headsman hesitated to strike, " "What dost 
thou fear ? " cried Kalegh. " Strike man, strike ! " 

Immediately he had become a martyr. James found 
it necessary, in fact, to issue an apology. Bacon, then 
lord chancellor, was appointed to the task, and though 
he had always been a friend and admirer of Kalegh, he 
accepted his ungenerous duty and wrote the Declara- 
tion. But neither Bacon nor James could quell the 
popular enthusiasm. The patriot. Sir John Eliot, who 
witnessed Ealegh's execution, spoke of " the fortitude 
of our Kalegh," and Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell 
believed they were bearing the same burden as he. 



EDMUND SPENSER 

Spenser has been called the poets' poet, partly be- 
cause of the unbounded praise which men like Milton 
have bestowed upon him, and partly because the qualities 
of his poetry appeal rather to the admiration of the art- 
ist than to the interest of the reader. Yet his Faerie 
Queen^ like Pilgrim^ s Progress, is an allegory filled 
not only with adventures of every kind but with char- 
acters who are in many cases the counterparts of those 
who still absorb the attention of young and old in the 
career of Bunyan's hero. The difficulty for the modern 
reader lies in Spenser's complication of the allegory, 
and in a certain unreal quality not unlike that which we 
see in Shelley. About Mr. Worldly Wiseman there is 
no doubt, and the man himself is still with us ; but we 
have to be told that Artegall represents not only justice 
but also Spenser's patron, Lord Grey of Wilton. A few 
readers, to be sure, enjoy the Faerie Queen as a story 
without reference to its moral or meaning; this mean- 
ing, however, played a great part in Spenser's own time. 
Milton speaks of " our sage and serious Poet Spenser, 
whom T dare be known to think a better teacher than 
Scotus or Aquinas;'''' and according to Dryden "ac- 
knowledged . . . that Spenser was his original." Still, 
what the poets love in Spenser is not so much his moral 
as his poetry. Of all men who have written English 
verse, to none has verse been such a natural and un- 
forced expression as to Spenser. 

Edmund Spenser was bom in London not far from 



EDMUND SPENSER 45 

the year 1552, son of John Spenser, who belonged to 
the gentle Lancashire family of that name, but had be- 
come a clothmaker in the City. In his Prothalamion 
the poet speaks of — 

" Merry London, my most kindly nurse, 
That to me gave this life's first native source, 
Though from another place I take my name, 
A house of ancient fame." 

In other words, humble as his condition was, he was con- 
nected with the Spencers of Althorpe, who made alli- 
ances with some of the most powerful nobles of that day, 
and are represented in our own time among the front 
ranks of the peerage. The poet was educated in the 
Merchant Taylors' School, and was most fortunate in 
his lot. Richard Midcaster, who presided over this newly 
founded grammar school, was not only a great teacher, 
but one of the first educational writers who insisted on 
English " as a medium of education and a vehicle for all 
kinds of learning." Although these views of Mulcaster's 
were not published until 1581, we may assume that his 
teaching reflected them from the start; and they must 
have strengthened the poet not only in the love and know- 
ledge of his native tongue, but in that finer sense of its 
poetic genius which made him reject in practice the 
theory of classical imitations to which he gave for a 
while half-hearted allegiance. He seems to have been an 
excellent scholar, and as such received from a wealthy 
Londoner pecuniary help both while a pupil at the 
school and as sizar at Pembroke Hall in the University 
of Cambridge. As head of the school, moreover, he 
probably attracted the notice of the Bishop of London, 
Grindal, whom he afterwards praised in the ShephearcTs 
Calendar under the name of Algrind. At the age of 



46 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

seventeen ho luul composed verse, not an unusual per- 
formance; the unusual fact was the i)ul)lication of this 
verse and the (juality of it. Dean Church points out 
that in these translations are to be found a gi-ace and 
an ease of stylo duo entirely to the young [)oct himself. 
There was no master in English from whom he could 
copy. 

At Cambridge Spenser lived on terms of intimate 
friendship with Edward Kirko, the E. K. of the Shep- 
heard's Calendar, and with Gabriel Harvey, whose ped- 
antry and vanity afterwards received such a scoring at 
the hands of clever ])amphlotcers like Tom Nashe, that 
his sound scholarshi}) and love of learning have been 
overlooked. With these friends Spenser studied eagerly 
the classics and the new learning of the Renaissance, 
as well as the poets of Fran(!e and Italy, and presum- 
ably what he regarded as masterpieces in his own tongue, 
the works of Chaucer. lie left Cand)ridge, a Master of 
Arts, in 1576. After spending some time in the North 
of England, the original home of his family, losing his 
heart meanwhile to a certain Rosalind, who seems to 
have ai)preciated the poet in Spenser but refused him 
as a husband, he appeared in London. By the autumn 
of 1579 he is writing thence to Gabriel Harvey. He is 
already on fairly intimate terms with Sidney and nobles 
of the court. Harvey has introduced his friend to the 
Earl of Leicester, and by 1578 S})enser is living at the 
hitter's house in the Sti'and. He has had an audience 
of the Queen, and is leading, as far as his means allow, 
the life of a man of fashion. Tlie letters to Harvey tell 
only of his literary life, along with a few flirtations. 
He signs himself "Immerito," and with his correspond- 
ent's full sympathy outlines the plan of the "Areopa- 



EDMUND SPENSJER 47 

Sl^us," a club whose members were to unite in driving 
out the tyrant Rhyme from English poetry, and substi- 
tuting for it the unrhymed measures of classical verse. 
All of them made experiments in these nev^ metres ; it 
is enough to say that if Spenser had written nothing- 
better than the iambics which he sends to Harvey, he 
would neither have won a name in English poetry nor 
even achieved a success in the club. His instinct was 
better than his belief. At this very time he was writing 
the smooth rhymed verses of his Sliepheard's Calendar^ 
which appeared in December, 1579, as the work of 
" Imraerito," with notes and a commentary by " E. K." 
Despite these disguises the public laiew it for Spen- 
ser's work, and he was everywhere hailed as the " new 
poet." This poem, a series of twelve pastorals in the 
Italian style, with an allegory centred in the humble life 
of shepherds, instead of the world of knights and fan- 
tastic adventure chosen for the Faerie Queen^ includes 
the poet himself, who is called " Colin Clout," and " Hob- 
binol," or Gabriel Harvey, and fair "Elisa," the Queen, 
and even her mother, Anne Boleyn. Besides this, Spenser 
had tried his hand at other kinds of poetry, even the 
drama. Nine comedies in the Italian style had been 
read by Harvey and preferred to a specimen which 
Spenser had shown him from the Faerie Queen. But 
though these were real plays, they were never published 
and have not been preserved. Another lost work of 
Spenser's, written about this time, was entitled "The 
English Poet." It would be interesting if we could read 
the New Poet's prose about his art. After all, it was 
in the Shepheard's Calendar that Spenser revived the 
best traditions of English poetry, and it is not in vain 
that "E. K." places him, next to Chaucer, "the load- 



48 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

star of our language." Spenser himself, in tlie June 
eclogue, names Chaucer as his master. 

" The God of Shepheards, Tityrus, is dead, 
Who taught me homely, as I can, to make." . . . 

His two years in London brought him no real favor 
at court. He made friends among the courtiers, but 
envy and even hatred were already astir, and what he 
mourned later was doubtless revealed to him in this 
first experience : — 

" discontent of my long frnitlesse stay 
In Princes Court, and expectation vaine 
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away." 

In outright satire, too, he gives advice about the way to 
succeed at court, when one " must learn to laugh, to lie, 
to forge, to scoffe, to company, to cipuch, to please, to 
be a beetle-stock of thy great Master's will, to scorn 
or mock." The whole of the Mother Hubherd's Tale, 
closely imitating Chaucer's style, is a satire on the times, 
and contains moreover a fine passage describing the 
"rightful courtier," the ideal gentleman, as the poet 
conceived him, in service to a noble prince. Whether or 
not the fox in this fable is the great man at court 
who baffled Spenser himself is not clear ; but the follow- 
ing famous passage is autobiographical, and the poet 
says it was "composed in youth." 

" Full little knowest thou, that hast not tride, 
What hell it is in suing long to bide ; 
To loose good dayes, that might be better spent ; 
To wast long nights in pensive discontent ; 
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with tears and sorrow; 
To have tliy Princes grace, yet want her Peeres ; 
To have thy asking, yet waite manie yeeres ; 



EDMUND SPENSER 49 

To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; 

To eate thy heart through comfortlesse dispaires." 

It is said that Burleigh blocked the poet's advance- 
ment. In any case, the best that Lord Leicester could 
do for him was to persuade Lord Grey of Wilton, just 
appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, to take Spenser 
with him as his private secretary. This was in 1580 ; 
and for eighteen years, almost to his death, the poet 
spent nearly all his time in the exile of a turbulent and 
dangerous province. It was surely no fit place for such 
a man as Spenser ; war, when it deserved the name, was 
carried on' without regard to the simplest claims of 
justice and mercy, but as a rule desperate outbreaks of 
the natives alternated with bloody reprisals on the part 
of the conquerors. Laws slept ; murder and arson were 
the rule ; and those to whom lands were given in the 
rebellious districts lived as if over a volcano. Towards 
the end of his stay Spenser wrote in prose A View 
of the Present State of Ireland^ in which he sets forth 
the desperate condition of affairs, yet not without re- 
cognition of the claims which Ireland might well urge 
upon English justice and common sense. 

He held various official posts in Ireland, and besides 
his pay secured large gifts in land, and in 1588 settled 
as one of the new planters or, as they were called, 
" undertakers," at Kilcolman Castle, in the county of 
Cork, on an estate of about three thousand acres granted 
him two years before. This exile, embittered by quarrels, 
had its bright side in the neighborhood of Sir Walter 
Ralegh. In 1589, after he had shown his friend three 
books of the Faerie Queen in manuscript, and aroused 
unbounded enthusiasm for its beauty, Spenser took 
Ralegh's advice and with him repaired to London in 



50 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

order to see the Queen and if possible secure some post 
at home. Doubtless as means to this end, though literary- 
ambition must also have played its part, Spenser pub- 
lished the three books of the Faerie Queen, dedicating 
them to Elizabeth and explaining in an introduction 
addressed to Ralegh what was to be done in the twelve 
books of the whole poem. This, as " a continued Alle- 
gory, or darke conceit," must have its general inten- 
tion clearly set forth : it is " to fashion a gentleman or 
noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline," Such a 
moral, the poet goes on, should be " coloured with an 
historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight 
to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite 
of the ensample." The fiction which he chose was the 
" historye of King Arthure." The Faerie Queen herself, 
he explains, in the general sense is glory, for which the 
true knight should strive ; but in particular is " the most 
excellent and glorious person of our Soveraine ; " and 
then follows an analysis of part of the intended poem. 
That such an undertaking flattered the vanity of Eliza- 
beth and filled what modern slang terms " a long-felt 
want " among the splendid and adventurous nobles as 
well as the gentry of England, is evident enough. More- 
over, the moral part of Spenser's plan, springing 
from certain Puritan proclivities which seem to have 
remained alive in him despite his courtier's career, 
appealed not only to spirits akin to his own, but to that 
large class of men who made the ideal, no matter in 
what sordid mixture, a part of their lives. Ralegh him- 
self is a case in point, but thousands of his countrymen 
were inspired by these glittering dreams. Men sought 
a fountain of youth, a land of gold, a Northwest 
Passage ; in brief, the old knightly quest seemed close 



EDMUND SPENSER 51 

enough to reality for EHzabetiian minds. Hence the 

large appeal of Spenser's poem and the instant favor 

which it received. The stingy Queen granted him a 

goodly pension which Burleigh is said to have cut down 

to fifty pounds. The court was enthusiastic and made 

this new poem a kind of gentleman's handbook ; and 

its author, already famous as the New Poet, received in 

that great decade of our literature what may fairly be 

called the homage of his fellow poets. In a poem which 

Spenser composed after his return to Ireland, — for his 

quest had been in vain so far as English preferment 

was concerned, — he wrote, under the title of Colin 

Clout 's Come Home Again, a pastoral addressed to his 

friend Ralegh from Kilcolman in December, 1591, in 

which many of the English poets are named. The stanza, 

" And then, though last not least, is ^tion, 
A gentler shepheard may no where be found: 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts invention, 
Doth like himselfe Heroically sound," . , . 

of which the last line would fit Shakespeare, is prob- 
ably though not certainly a genuine allusion to the 
greater poet. 

Although this poem was not published for some years, 
the publisher of the Faerie Queen put forth a volume 
of Spenser's minor poems in 1591. In the Ruines of 
Time Spenser bewails the deaths of his friend Sidney ^ 
and of his patron Leicester ; but in Mother HuhhercVs 
Tale, quoted above for its satire on the court, as well 
as in the Teares of the Muses, with its lament for the 
decadence of poetry, there was opportunity for offense 
in high places. Tradition has it that offense was taken. 

1 Of the elegies on Sidney, published in 1595 with Colin Clout, only 
the Astrophel belongs to Spenser. 



52 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

In June, 1594, the poet married Elizabeth, daughter 
of James Boyle. Eighty-eight sonnets and an epithala- 
mion, the latter a most exquisite poem, record his court- 
ship and marriage. In one o£ the sonnets he praises the 
name of his bride as belonging to his own mother and 
to his Sovereign Queen, tells what they have done for 
him, and cries, — 

" Ye three Elizabeths! for ever live, 
That three such graces did unto me give." 

In the marriage lay he tells us that the time of year is 

" when the Sunne is in his chiefest hight," that is, the 

middle of June ; and thus pictures his bride : — 

" Behold, whiles she before the altar stands, 
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes, 
And blesseth her with his two happy hands, 
How the red roses flush up in her cheekes." . . . 

By his wdfe Spenser had three sons and a daughter; 
descendants of the eldest son are still living. 

Late in 1595 Spenser journeyed again to London, 
taking with him three more books of the Faerie Queen. 
The King of Scotland, afterwards James I of England, 
complained through the English ambassador of the cal- 
umny thrown upon his mother, Queen Mary, who appears 
in no attractive guise as Duessa in the fourth book 
of the poem. " False Duessa" she is called, and is re- 
corded as guilty of the worst crimes conceivable. In 
fact, she is foil to the perfectly virtuous Elizabeth, who 
is represented by both Gloriana and Belphoebe. This 
protest, though it failed to bring about the punishment 
of the poet, is good proof of the wide circulation and 
the popularity of the book. Spenser, moreover, had 
a powerful protector in the Earl of Essex, at whose 
house he was for some time a guest ; and it was proba- 



EDMUND SPENSER 53 

bly to show his usefulness as an official, his loyalty, 
and his claims for promotion to more congenial service, 
that he wrote the above-mentioned View of the Present 
State of Ireland, licensed in 1598, but not printed until 
after his death. But as in Swift's case, there was to be 
no return from Spenser's Irish exile. It was after a year 
of unavailing endeavors that he wrote, in his Protha- 
lamion, a wedding lay for two daughters of the Earl of 
Worcester, those lines about his " long fruitless stay in 
Princes Court and expectation vain," which we have 
quoted above. Early in 1597 Spenser returned to Ire- 
land; nor could his appointment in September, 1598, 
as sheriff of Cork, a high and dignified office, console 
him for his failure. It was no sinecure. In October thou- 
sands of rebels, under the Earl of Desmond, swarmed 
through this part of Ireland, and Kilcolman Castle was 
burned to the ground. Spenser escaped to Cork with 
his wife and children ; it was reported on the authority 
of Ben Jonson, though the fact needs better proof, that 
one of the children was burned to death. In December 
Spenser was sent to England with official dispatches 
about the war ; but he seems to have been a dying man, 
and survived his arrival in London little over a month. 
Ben Jonson told Drummond, in the famous Conversa- 
tions, that the poet " died for lack of bread, in King 
Street, and refused twenty pieces sent to him by my 
Lord of Essex, saying that he had no time to spend 
them." Other writers of the time refer to his poverty 
and the misery of his death, and the general fact must 
be accepted as true ; on the other hand, starvation seems 
an almost impossible assumption. His friends were nu- 
merous ; he was a kind of royal messenger, and could 
have been neither neglected nor utterly destitute. What 



54 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

seems most likely is that a broken-liearted man, with 
mortal illness upon him, fresh from the overwhelming 
tragedy of Kilcolman, crept into those obscure lodgings 
in "Westminster and called for " easeful death." 

Biographers quote Aubrey's statement on the author- 
ity of an old actor that Spenser was " a little man, wore 
short hair, little bands, and little cuffs." As a writer 
he has been placed among the foremost English poets. 
In his own day he was not popular in the ordinary 
sense, but he was the favorite of the aristocracy and 
of the leading men of letters. As the people of Queen 
Anne's age saw themselves depicted in Gulliver's 
Travels^ the Elizabethan gentleman saw in the Faerie 
Queen^ though by a very different method and with 
praise and abuse substituted for satire, the great char- 
acters of his time in transparent disguise. He saw his 
enemies attacked, his friends and his sovereign praised 
to heart's desire. He could recognize Ireland in the 
scenery of the Faerie Queen^ and the revival of chiv- 
alry and knightly deeds could blind him to the horrors 
of actual Irish war. All these elements of interest are 
now stripped from Spenser's verse, and what remains 
is poetry pure and simple. Spenser wrote his poetry 
with consummate ease, and we may be sure that, like 
Shakespeare, he " never blotted." But he differs from 
Shakespeare, he differs from his own master Chaucer, 
in shunning the real. His feet are almost never on the 
gi'ound. Lovers of poetry for poetry's sake, however, 
will always turn to him ; and he gave England its first 
great poem in its greatest age. 



FRANCIS BACON 

Pope's famous line about Bacon, "the wisest, bright- 
est, meanest of mankind," has been denounced by re- 
cent writers as inadequate and false. Bacon was not 
the meanest of mankind ; in one sense he was not mean 
at all. But in another sense the line is true, expressing 
the greatest possible contradiction between Bacon's 
greatness of intellect, the sweep and range of his ideas, 
his plans for the increase of human knowledge and the 
advance of human achievement, and that pitiable and 
recurrent weakness in his conduct of life. Weakness 
is not the only charge against him ; after making all 
allowances for the ways of his time, there remains no- 
thing but a very ugly word for ingratitude to his patron 
and treachery to his friend, in the case of the Earl of 
Essex. But we cannot judge character by the weakest 
link in the chain. Bacon's enemies, foremost among them 
Coke, the greatest English lawyer, brought about his 
downfall, and have, in a manner, written the verdict 
passed upon Bacon by history; his friends, however (and 
there are great names among them), bear witness to 
qualities and general disposition the reverse of mean. 
Above all, his works give Bacon the stamp of greatness. 
He cannot be summed up in a few words. There must 
have been something in his make-up which rendered 
him unable to stand the test of action, and inspired 
practical men with distrust of his splendid powers. 
Queen Elizabeth never put any real responsibility upon 
him or intrusted him with any important office, though 



56 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

a keen intellect like Bacon's was the kind which she 
loved to employ in her service. And if he rose to emi- 
nence under James, it was because he consented to be 
the tool of one of the weakest of English kings and 
of the most despicable of royal favorites. 

Bacon began life with great advantages. Born in 
London January 22, 1561 (new style), the son of Sir 
Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, and of the highly accom- 
plished daughter of Sir Antony Cook, a woman well 
versed in Greek and Latin, deeply religious and zeal- 
ous for the best interests of her children. Bacon could 
ask nothing better on the score of family inheritance 
and influences. His uncle by marriage was Elizabeth's 
great minister, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, and the 
men who frequented his father's house were leaders of 
the nation which was now beginning to lead Protestant 
Europe. Bacon literally grew up along with the great- 
ness of Elizabethan England. His religious training 
was on the stricter lines of the reforming party, and 
although he took little part in the religious disputes of 
his time, there can be no doubt that these early influ- 
ences had their part in the greatest reform that philo- 
sophy and science have ever known. He was the great 
reformer, not of men's belief, but of men's thought. 

He went to the University of Cambridge at the age 
of twelve. This feat, now impossible, was not then an 
uncommon thing for boys of birth and ability. Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury, Waller the poet, are in this list, 
and many other names could be added. At sixteen, 
already a member of Gray's Inn in London, he was sent 
to France to complete his education abroad with the 
English ambassador, and remained there for two years. 
So far things had gone rapidly and well for Bacon ; but 



FRANCIS BACON 57 

when he was eighteen the death of his father called him 
back, a younger son, to a career dependent upon his 
own exertions, — long and fruitless so far as the favor 
of the court was concerned, and hindered, it would 
seem, rather than helped, by powerful relatives. Lord 
Burleigh and his son Robert Cecil, whose ministry 
lasted well into the days of King James. He devoted 
himself to the law, lived at Gray's Inn, and seems to 
have divided his time between the study of his pro- 
fession and vain appeals for employment. In our mod- 
ern phrase, he kept himself before the public, writing 
papers on matters of national interest. These were 
circulated in manuscripts, but, as Dean Church says, 
" In our day they would have been pamphlets or mag- 
azine articles." His health, particularly his digestion, 
during these early years, was by no means satisfactory ; 
but it does not seem to have interfered with his pow- 
ers of continuous and concentrated literary toil. Even 
after his disgrace and downfall, a ruined man, upwards 
of sixty, so ill that he could not leave his house, his 
power of production was unabated, and he accomplished 
some of his most brilliant work. When twenty-four he 
became member of Parliament, and four years later 
he began to figure as one of its most active members. 
With the reign of James I Bacon became one of the 
leaders of the House, and was active both in the busi- 
ness of legislation and in debate. Ben Jonson praises 
his powers as an orator and pleader in the highest terms : 
" His hearers could not cough or look aside from him 
without loss." In conversation he was equally brilliant, 
though he seems to have been somewhat too fond of his 
jest. Meanwhile he tried his hand at the flatteries of a 
courtier, and composed toward the close of Elizabeth's 



58 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

reign several pieces for the entertainment of the Queen. 
But in spite of all his efforts, legal, literary, social, in 
spite of all his appeals to a powerful relative, he found 
himself at thirty, an age then regarded as we regard 
middle life, still obscure and without prospects. He now 
writes the famous letter to Lord Burleigh, " from my 
lodgings at Gray's Inn," which sets forth the plan of 
his life, the scope of his ambition, and his pressing lack 
of means. 

" I wax now somewhat ancient ; one and thirty years 
is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I 
thank God, I find confirmed ; and I do not fear that 
action shall impair it, because I account my ordinary 
course of study and meditation to be more painful than 
most parts of action are." Then comes the great pro- 
fession : " Lastly, I confess that 1 have as vast contem- 
plative ends as I have moderate civil ends ; for I have 
taken all knowledge to he my province ; and if I could 
purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with 
frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the 
other with blind experiments and auricular traditions 
and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope 
I should bring in industrious observations, grounded 
conclusions, and profitable inventions and discover- 
ies." . . . 

In short, Bacon asks his uncle for some means by 
which he can live in state befitting his rank, and devote 
an abundant leisure to the reform of human knowledsre. 
This letter, however, brought him nothing but promises, 
and he went on living as he could and using his en- 
forced spare time for literary ends. In 1597 he appeared 
in print with the first edition of his essays. Though 
the style of these essays places them among the great 



FRANCIS BACON 59 

achievements of English prose, it is characteristic of 
him, the man who "took all knowledge to be his pro- 
vince," and made his appeal to mankind at large, that 
he caused them to be put into Latin. The modern lan- 
guages, he wrote to a friend, would at some time "play 
the bankrupt with books ;" though it must be added that 
these same essays were translated into Italian. 

Meanwhile Bacon had been making a short-lived 
friendship and a life-long enmity. The Earl of Essex, 
prime favorite of the Queen, a man of great parts and 
endowed with all the qualities that make for success 
save prudence, was one of the few who appreciated 
Bacon's real greatness. The two were on terms of in- 
timate friendship; and Essex threw himself into the 
cause of his friend's advancement with characteristic 
zeal, urging his appointment as Attorney-General. The 
Queen, like her advisers, the two Cecils, father and son, 
wished to appoint Coke to this place ; and after a long 
delay, which only served to deepen the great lawyer's 
hostility to Bacon, the efforts of Essex came to an igno- 
minious end, and Coke secured the prize. It was sup- 
posed that Bacon could have the post of Solicitor, which 
had been suggested as a compromise during the struggle 
with Coke, but even this favor was now refused. Bacon 
was thoroughly disgusted, and seems to have thought 
of retiring to Cambridge to devote himself entirely to 
his studies. This course was recommended not simply 
by the disappointment but also by Bacon's financial 
embarrassment ; twice he was arrested for debt. In this 
latter respect, however, Essex could be helpful without 
leave of minister or Queen, and gave Bacon lands worth 
<£1800 in the money of those days. He also tried to 
make a rich marriage for his friend ; but again the 



60 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

hard-headed and implacable Coke carried off the prize, 
the wealthy widow of Sir Christopher Hatton. 

In what was left of the ill-fated Earl's career Bacon 
seems to have played the part of a wise and consistent 
friend, barring of course the last and tragic scene, the 
trial for high treason, in which Bacon, as special counsel 
along with the Attorney-General, directed the exami- 
nation, selected the evidence, and pressed the dangerous 
charges against his friend. There seems to be no doubt 
that the trial might have resulted differently but for 
Bacon's conduct of the case. Excuses have been offered 
in his behalf, but they are of little weight. It is said 
that he could not refuse to do the bidding of the Queen, 
but there have been many men who would at least have 
offered passive resistance in the interests of so bountiful 
a patron and so close a friend. After the Queen's death 
Bacon himseK wrote an Apology for this affair, claiming 
the part of one who tried to reconcile his sovereign and 
the Earl. The exact truth will never be revealed; but a 
guess may be hazarded that in private Bacon served 
Essex to the extent of his powers both by advice and 
by attempts before the actual trial to mitigate the se- 
verity of the charge. The correspondence of the two 
shows Bacon's earlier efforts to dissuade Essex from 
schemes and deeds which his enemies were only too glad 
to forward. But in the conduct of the case the learned 
counsel played his part as prosecutor only too well. As 
in Bacon's other misfortunes, it was the public part 
which attracted attention and passed into history, while 
the underground stream remains largely a matter of 
surmise. 

Even this sacrifice of friendship to interest failed of 
its full reward. He was forty-one years of age and 



FRANCIS BACON 61 

badly in need of funds, but only his pittance was given 
liim. Coke was forever blocking bis way, and in open 
court the two came to words which Bacon himself has 
reported. " Mr. Bacon," said the lawyer, " if you have 
any tooth against me pluck it out ; for it will do you 
more hurt than all the teeth in your head will do you 
good." Bacon " answered coldly in these very words : 
' Mr. Attorney, I respect you ; I fear you not ; and 
the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I 
will think of it.' " After further insult from Coke, 
Bacon " said no more but this : ' Mr. Attorney, do not 
depress me so far ; for I have been your better, and 
may be again, when it please the Queen.' " It never 
did please the Queen ; but, under James, Bacon, if 
only for a time, carried out his threat against Coke. 
He was knighted by the new King, not alone, as he 
wished, for the sake of the distinction, but, as he feared, 
" gregarious in a troop " with three hundred others. 

About this time, he says, he had " found out an al- 
derman's daughter, an handsome maiden, to his liking," 
and nearly three years later he married her in a splen- 
did fashion described in a letter of the time. " He was 
clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself 
and his wife such store of raiments of cloth of silver 
and gold that it draws deep into her portion." These 
three years had been full of activity. The first of 
them was largely devoted to preparation for his great 
work " for the service of mankind." He wrote in Latin 
a sort of introduction to a treatise on the interpreta- 
tion of nature, and describes himself in the following 
words : — 

" For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing 
so well as for the study of Truth ; as having a mind 



62 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances 
of things (which is the chief point) and at the same 
time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler 
differences ; as being gifted by nature with desire to 
seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness 
to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose 
and set in order ; and as being a man that neither 
affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that 
hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature 
had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth." 
But this quest of truth was soon broken. As member of 
Parliament, Bacon contrived both to gain the confidence 
of the House of Commons, to direct its affairs, and at 
the same time to win the favor of the King, obtaining 
for him terms of compromise that ended a very serious 
dispute between the monarch and his first Parliament. 
It must not be forgotten that Bacon also did useful work 
in reforming ancient abuses. Between the Parliament 
of 1604 and that of 1605 he wrote and published an- 
other English book on The Advancement of Know- 
ledge. In 1607, almost in sight of his fiftieth year, 
Bacon was at last appointed Solicitor-General. A year 
later, he wrote down a remarkable account of his pre- 
sent standing, his plans, and his prospects, and called it 
Commentarius Solutus, "A Book of Loose Notes," as 
Spedding interprets it. Barring those endless and often 
morbid journals which have lately come into fashion, 
such as the Journal of Amiel or of Marie Bashkirt- 
seff, it would be hard to fmd such a revelation of self. 
It contains a detailed statement of Bacon's physique, 
Tules for the care of his health, household matters, 
rules for his own conduct and speech in public, notes 
on persons with whom he had to deal, and, above all, 



FRANCIS BACON 63 

outlines of his great scheme for the reform of human 
thought. But unlike the journals above mentioned, it 
does not seem to have been meant even remotely for 
the public eye. Some of his ideas are surprisingly mod- 
ern, and on the whole this document, on the personal 
and intellectual side, matches Defoe's equally wonderful 
anticipation of public and practical progress in his Es- 
say on Prefects. Another book now appeared on The 
Wisdom, of the Ancients, in which Bacon interprets 
mythology as a series of allegories dealing with the most 
intricate problems of human life. It is absurd enough 
to us, who know that the old myths spring from the 
earliest and rudest stages of man's development, but in 
the author's jbime was widely read ; indeed it was " one 
of the most popular of his works." 

The death of Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury, in May, 
1612, removed the last restraint upon Bacon's progress, 
as well as upon the King's folly. Indeed the two now 
went hand in hand. Though baffled at first in his ap- 
peals for office, Bacon in 1613 persuaded the king to 
make Coke Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and give 
one Hobart Coke's place at the Common Pleas. This 
was his first victory over Coke, who wept both at the 
cause of his own promotion and at the consequent loss 
in salary. Thus in October the way was made for 
Bacon to gain the office of Attorney-General, which 
had been refused to him twenty years before. 

Bacon's activity in his new post left nothing to be 
desired ; but while he did many good and useful things, 
aiming at the reform of abuses and the surer and 
swifter course of the law, he was forced to carry out 
the disgraceful schemes of his masters. He wished to 
revise the laws, and drew up a plan to this end, but to 



64 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

no purpose. With all Ms excellent ideas, Ms clear in- 
sight, and his designs for impartial administration of 
the law, Bacon the Attorney-General is rightly regarded 
by history as the tool and creature of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham. For a short time the new official tasted the 
sweets of revenge upon his old enemy Coke, who mainly 
through Bacon's agency was removed from his post as 
Chief Justice in 1616. He aided the King in his strug- 
gle for absolute rule ; but it must be remembered that 
if Bacon could have had Buckingham's influence, that 
rule would have been just and beneficent. But this was 
not the case. He continued to do the bidding of the 
favorite, and was rewarded early in 1617 with the great 
post of Lord Chancellor, receiving, however, the full 
title not until a year later. Honors were now crowded 
upon Mm. He was made Baron Verulam in 1618 and 
somewhat later Viscount St. Albans. Thus at the age 
of sixty Bacon had reached the highest honors of his 
profession. More than this, he had just published, in 
however fragmentary shape, his great scheme for the 
Reform of Human Thought, the Novum Organum^ 
a work which by general consent marks the new era in 
philosophy and the beginning of the modern scientific 
spirit. 

From this height, seemingly without any warning, 
Bacon fell to the depths of disgrace. That he was 
sacrificed to popular indignation, which had been grow- 
ing steadily under the pressure of misgovernment and 
abuse of the king's prerogative, is clear enough ; but 
why he fell so unresistingly, so suddenly, and so far, 
can be explained only by that fatal weakness in his 
character which has been noticed before. He had 
been an able Lord Chancellor ; but he was after all 



FRANCIS BACON 65 

the creature of Buckingham, and when the storm broke, 
popular indignation, heedless of the exact merits of the 
case, swept him away. Most important of all, his old 
enemy Coke was now directing that very storm. Bacon 
was charged by the House of Commons with corruption 
in office ; witnesses alleged that he had taken gifts 
from suitors in his court. He had accepted bribes, they 
said, as high as one thousand pounds. Writing to the 
King, Bacon defended himself, and maintained that he 
had not perverted justice. To the public he seemed 
to put a sufficiently bold face on the matter, but in 
private he had already given up the fight. He made 
his will, and in a prayer which curiously reminds one 
of a man opposite to Bacon in every way, the sturdy 
old Dr. Johnson, confessed his weakness, while in a 
manner justifying his course : " The state and bread of 
the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes : 
I have hated aU cruelty and hardness of heart : I 
have (though in a despised weed) procured the good 
of all men." Why, we are forced to ask, could not 
Bacon have faced his accusers with words like these, 
and dared them to produce their facts and to prove 
the credibility of their witnesses? Instead of this, he 
appeals to the good offices of the King. But his ene- 
mies pressed him the harder. He offered to resign the 
Great Seal and so escape further condemnation ; and 
towards the end of April, 1621, a full statement of the 
charges against him was brought forward. Without 
protest of innocence, without the least attempt to fight 
his case, he threw himself upon the mercy of the 
House of Lords, his judges, with the general plea of 
guilty. To a committee of this house, which demanded 
that he should confess all the separate abuses in the 



66 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

charge, he yielded with what seems to us pitiful haste, 
and asked them to be " merciful to a broken reed." He 
was summoned to the bar of the House of Lords to re- 
ceive sentence, but illness kept him at home. This sen- 
tence was severe enough, though some peers wished it 
even harder, and Coke hinted at the penalty of death. 
He was fined <£40,000, an enormous sum for those 
days, was sent to the Tower during the King's pleasure, 
court and Parliament were closed to him, and he was 
never to hold office of any kind. 

Never in history has so great a man suffered such a 
great disgrace ; it can be accounted for, if at all, by two 
considerations. By the practice of those times Bacon's 
attitude was by no means as culpable as it would seem 
now ; he was no vulgar and persistent taker of bribes, 
and probably rendered decisions according to the law ; 
but he did take gifts from successful suitors. More- 
over, he was continuing a system of court influence on 
the large scale, and shaping certain decisions to suit 
the purposes of his masters. With this system the 
public had become thoroughly enraged, and Bacon was 
the scapegoat whom they drove into the wilderness of 
disgrace. In the second place. Bacon's natural protec- 
tors, the King and Buckingham, lacked even the ele- 
mentary gratitude to defend so able and so willing a 
servant, though the Duke cast the solitary vote against 
the sentence of the House of Lords ; while Bacon him- 
self had nothing of that courage, even in a bad cause, 
which ennobled a later victim of the Stuart ingrati- 
tude, and made Strafford's watchword " Thorough " as 
conspicuous in adversity as in success. StiU a third 
excuse has been urged in Bacon's behalf : he knew 
well that resistance was useless. 



FRANCIS BACON 67 

Bacon's confinement In the Tower was cut short, after a 
few days, by the King. His fine was practically forgiven, 
and in spite of opposition he received a partial pardon. 
Nothing, however, could remove his disgrace, nor could 
he play any further part in public life, and he was de- 
pendent on the King's bounty. Yet it is a great mistake 
to think that Bacon was overwhelmed by his misfortunes 
and that he died of a broken heart. He fell back on that 
greater service to which he had devoted his leisure and 
to which he ought to have devoted his life. In the same 
year that saw his fall he wrote his admirable History 
of Henry the Seventh. He never gave up the hope of a 
full pardon and renewal of his public service. But neither 
of these came to him. All the more room was left for his 
greater work. To the last he was busied with his system 
for the new sciences, corresponding with learned men 
abroad, revising and translating his earlier writings. His 
service to philosophy was rather that of a pioneer than 
that of a colonist. He gives the idea and plans the sys- 
tem, leaving other men to do the work. It is a mistake 
to suppose that he accomplished something practical in 
the so-called natural sciences, although his death, as 
every one knows, was due to a scientific experiment. But 
everywhere he stimulated, reformed, and showed the 
way to better things. This is true even of his English 
style. Few books have a fresher appeal than Bacon's 
essays. In an era of ponderous and periodic prose it 
is refreshing to meet such sentences as that which opens 
the essay on Death : " Men fear death as children fear 
to go in the dark." No one has ever packed so much 
into so small a compass without prejudice to simplicity 
and clearness of style. His ideas, too, are almost in- 
variably sound ; for example, the essay on Plantations 



68 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

might be taken as a forecast of England's best colonial 
policy. 

Bacon was an extravagant man, never free from 
debt even in the days of his largest income. This state 
of things may be explained partly by his amazing fond- 
ness for display. His married life seems to have been 
no great success, as may be gathered from his will : 
" To my wife, a box of rings." Indeed, the chief inter- 
ests of this document, like Bacon's whole life, lean to 
the advancement of science, for which purpose he left 
funds to the two universities. He died April 9, 1626. 
His fatal illness was due to an experiment which he had 
made of the antiseptic properties of cold, stopping his 
carriage while he stuffed a chicken with snow from the 
wayside. In a famous passage of his will, he leaves his 
name " to the next ages and to foreign nations." Pos- 
terity and the world at large have responded nobly to 
his wish, and general opinion assigns him a rank equaled 
by no man in the world's history save Aristotle for eager- 
ness and breadth of mind. 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

It is a mistake to suppose that we know little con- 
cerning the life of Shakespeare. More is known about 
him than about other poets of his time, such as Fletcher 
and Chapman. It is because his works are so well and 
so widely appreciated that the facts of his life seem 
scant and unsatisfactory ; moreover, absurd suppositions 
— Baconian and other heresies — about the authorship 
of the plays have tended to make Shakespeare a far 
more obscure figure than he really is. And much as we 
know of his life, it is impossible to express him in a 
phrase. What Dryden said in satire of George Duke of 
Buckingham could be said of Shakespeare in earnest : — 

" A man so various that he seemed to be 
Not one, but all mankind's epitome." 

Byron may be called explosive, Shelley visionary, but 
for Shakespeare no single expression has been found. 

The name Shakespeare ^ was early discovered in 
Yorkshire and Cumberland, but is met more often in 
Warwickshire, where there were many of that name. 
Both spellings seem to have been used by the dramatist 
himself. 

He was born at Stratford-on-Avon, April 22 or 23, 
1564. One must not ignore the importance both of the 
time and the place of his birth. For the time, it is 
enough to recall the great names and the quickening 
national life of Elizabethan England. Warwickshire, 

' Shakspere has the sanction of the New Shakspere Society. Shake' 
speare is the prevailing literary form. 



70 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

often called the Heart of England, was not only beau- 
tiful in landscape but rich in folk-lore, while its nearness 
to London put Shakespeare in the line of purely^ Eng- 
lish literary traditions. North of the Tweed he would 
have been almost an alien to them. But the Thames 
valley from the time of Chaucer was the home of the 
literary language. 

During the poet's earliest boyhood his father, who came 
of a good yeoman stock, must have been one of the chief 
men of the town. He was successively " ale-taster, con- 
stable, affeeror, chamberlain, alderman ; lastly . . . Jus- 
tice of the Peace and High Bailiff of the Town." But 
he was incurably fond of lawsuits, sanguine, and given 
to undertaking tasks beyond his means of performance. 
He fell into difficulties of many kinds, and it was prob- 
ably only through his son's success that he subsisted 
comfortably in later life. The attitude of Shakespeare 
in his plays towards old men in general, and fathers in 
particular, has been traced to recollections of his own 
experience. The elder man has been conceived as " fer- 
vent, unsteady, and irrepressible . . . excitable, senten- 
tious, and dogmatic; " and Dickens's portraiture of his 
father as Mr. Micawber is suggested as a parallel case. 
However this may be, there can be no doubt that Shake- 
speare's mother, Mary Arden, who inherited considerable 
money and lands from her father, was of gentle blood. 
To her and her ancestors biographers trace the un- 
doubted sympathy which the poet shows in all his works 
for the gentler strain and for those modes of life and 
thought which can flourish only along with the traditions 
of the better classes. 

In trying to reproduce, however, the boyhood of 
Shakespeare, we must by no means think of him as an 




WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 

From the Droeshout portrait, used as the frontispiece of the First Folio Edition, 1623 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 71 

aristocrat. The lad, who by a tradition which Aubrey 
has handed down on fairly good authority, was after- 
wards apprenticed to a butcher, stood at no remove from 
the other children of the town. At the Stratford Gram- 
mar School he went through the usual course of edu- 
cation for boys of his degree. Latin in those days was 
still taught to some extent as a living language ; Shake- 
speare probably learned it to better purpose than school- 
boys of our own day. Nevertheless, he seems as an 
author to have preferred translations to originals ; he 
took from Ovid much of his mythology and classical ref- 
erences, and from North's Plutarch direct material for 
plots and characters. Every one knows Ben Jonson's 
account of the poet's " small Latin and less Greek." 
But when discussing Shakespeare's education we must 
remember that its importance lay in what it did for him 
as a reader and not as a scholar. His library has been 
noted, but we must not assume that all the references 
in his plays, traced to certain books, are based on read- 
ing. Conversation and a retentive memory will account 
for many a phrase and many an allusion ; especially 
after his arrival in London, when the most important 
part of his education was achieved, we must lay stress 
upon this source for so much of his varied and catholic 
information. We may compare the oral power of Athe- 
nian life, where the spoken word was so prevalent, and 
cite the conversation in Hamlet where Marcellus asks, 
" Who is 't that can inform me ? " and Horatio says, — 

« That can I ; 
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king 

Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway, 
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride, 
Dared to the combat ; " 



72 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and gives a short account of the development of hos- 
tilities between Norway and Denmark. 

Before Shakespeare went up to London, about the 
year 1585, by the evidence of certain facts and fairly 
trustworthy traditions, he was a wild and undisciplined 
but by no means vicious youth. The fact of his forced 
marriage with Ann Hathaway, in November, 1582, when 
he was but eighteen years of age, stands beyond reason- 
able dispute. That he was a confirmed poacher tradi- 
tion asserts so vigorously that modern biographers are 
inclined to accept the main fact. In 1583 a daughter 
Susanna was born, and in 1585 Hamnet and Judith, 
the twins. Of these children his only son Hamnet died 
in 1596. Susanna, the oldest daughter, was married in 
1607 to Dr. John Hall, and lived in Stratford until 
her death in 1649 ; while Judith, who married Thomas 
Quiney, a wine merchant, just before her father's death, 
lived until 1662. The best traditions about Shakespeare, 
collected, as Professor Raleigh remarks, by people who 
had no case to prove or theory to defend, passed upon 
record soon after the death of this younger daughter, 
were quite local in origin, and therefore, if not worthy 
of implicit belief, are to be accepted in the main as true. 

According to a conversation held in 1693 with a 
Stratford man who was born before Shakespeare died, 
the latter " ran from Ms master " — the butcher — "to 
London, and there was received in the playhouse as a 
servitor." Another tradition which there is no reason 
to discredit makes his flight to London the result of 
his poaching and the consequent hostility of the main 
sufferer, Sir Thomas Lucy. According to Rowe, Shake- 
speare made a ballad upon the knight, so bitter that 
the prosecution was renewed, and the budding poet fled 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 73 

to London. Davies says that Shakespeare " was much 
given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, 
particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft 
whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him 
fly his native county to his own advancement." More- 
over, there is little doubt that Sir Thomas has been hung 
in Shakespeare's gallery, not of rogues, but of imbeciles, 
in the person of Justice Shallow, a foolish country squire 
who appears most entertainingly in the second part of 
Henry /F^and at the beginning of the Merry Wwes.^ 

Whatever the energies of Shakespeare may have done 
to make him the hero of such exploits as these, it is cer- 
tain that he found no literary expression of his powers 
until his arrival in London ; and although the only 
works which he published himself, his poems, appeared 
early in his career, one may be sure that his ambitions 
as a poet resulted from his work upon and for the stage. 
The flight to London, therefore, as in so many other 
lives of eminent men, was the prime factor in his career 
as an artist. 

London, as Shakespeare saw it, was a far brighter and 
lustier town than the modern city of perpetual smoke. 
As Professor Baker points out, the city proper had a 
population of one hundred thousand. In the neighbor- 
ing villages and on the Bankside across the river were 
perhaps as m^ny more. Strangers gathered in the inns 
of the last-named place, and there too were built the 
theatres known as the Swan, the Hope, the Rose, and 
the Globe. In 1590, however, London had but two 
playhouses, the Theatre and the Curtain, " built near 

^ The Lucys had three luces in their coat-of-arms, and Shakespeare 
\vith a malicious pun refers to the " dozen white luces " on Shallow's 
"old coat." 



74 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

together in Sliorediteh, just outside the city limits." The 
plays were also given in the inn-yards. Besides licensed 
companies of players there were the choir-boys of St. 
Paul's, who acted, as Professor Baker thinks, in the 
yard of the Convocation House. From all ground within 
the city, controlled by the council, mainly a Puritan 
body, plays and players were jealously excluded. The 
early theatres were crude affairs. The pit was uncov- 
ered, though a sort of hood projected over the stage ; 
the stage itself was double, with an upper and a lower 
division, and there was a rude mechanism for stage ef- 
fects. The play began early in the afternoon and lasted 
less than three hours. Patrons of the theatre, so far as 
the better class was concerned, were courtiers, members 
of the nobility and their adherents, and such persons as 
barristers and students in the inns of court. Add to 
these the floating population of the taverns, and the 
more or less disreputable folk of the kind that frequent 
a modern race-track, and we have the audience to which 
playwrights of Shakespeare's time made their appeal. 

The career which Shakespeare chose, or which may 
have been forced upon him, had the disadvantage of 
ill repute. That he felt at times the shame which at- 
tached to the calling of the actor, a shame derived not 
only from edicts of the Church but from one long line 
of tradition, through the Middle Ages, of the old Ro- 
man contempt for the mimus, is probable enough, and 
one of his sonnets may express the actor's bitterness. 
He would chide fortune — 

" That did not better for my life provide 
Than public means which public manners breeds. 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 75 

But a rapidly growing profession offered great possi- 
bilities and promise. The theatre when Shakespeare 
left it was very different from the theatre when he be- 
gan, and it is clear that he played no small part in this 
progress. Companies of players, often made up of noble- 
men's servants, and at first strolling about the country 
but afterwards settling near the city, had really founded 
this new trade. Its profits rose enormously. Plays 
improved with the fortunes of the player ; rude and 
uneven, they served originally as mere occasion and 
vehicle for the popular actor. The clown or jester, as 
we know from Shakespeare's own complaint, had the 
prominent place. Rough action predominated. Then 
came that group of university-bred men who really 
created Elizabethan drama, — Lyly, Greene, Peele, and 
above all, Marlowe. Plays of real worth, even of genius, 
had now appeared ; and it was at this supremely favor- 
able time that Shakespeare began his work. Identified 
with the players by his lack of academic training and by 
his early efforts as an actor, perhaps even as a servitor, 
according to one tradition, he knew how to profit by the 
example of the academic group, and learned his most 
important lessons as a playwright from Marlowe. He 
revised old plays for new uses ; and the first recorded 
notice of him is the denunciation in Greene's Groat' s- 
worth of Wit, the famous death-bed confession, written 
in 1592. The writer warns his friends of the university 
group not to trust the players : " For there is an up- 
start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his 
Tigers heart wrapt in a Players' hide, supposes he is 
as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best 
of you ; and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is 
in his own conceit the only Shakescene in the country." 



76 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The verse in italics is paraphrased from Henry VI, 
and the Shakeseene himself must be its author. The 
whole quotation has more meaning than appears on its 
surface. Up to this time the players, so to speak, had 
boujjht a new kind of drama from its inventors and. 
makers, but now the prosperous companies, handling, 
as we should say, an increasing business, began to man- 
ufacture their own goods, using and improving the 
pattern of their old purchases, and driving the first 
makers out of the market. That Shakespeare neverthe- 
less contrived to put himself on good terms with the 
academic school is certain evidence of his genial char- 
acter. These men, like the Johnsons and Goldsmiths of 
a later day, were men of letters simply, living by their 
wits and selling their brains to the players as the later 
men sold their work to the publisher. Shakespeare's at- 
titude was altogether different. Authorship with him 
began as part of his larger business. Revision and 
adaptation revealed to him his own powers of indepen- 
dent production. He could make as well as re-make ; 
genius took the place of talent ; and thus what Hallam 
calls the " Shakespeare of Heaven " grew out of the 
" Shakespeare of Earth," and the poet asserted himself 
apart from his trade. 

By his poems, however, Venus and Adonis and 
The Rajie of Lucrece^ which were published and read 
under his own name, he became favorably known to the 
world of letters, and gained a distinction which his plays 
would never have given him. The sonnets also, circu- 
lated for some time in manuscript before their publica- 
tion, contributed to this result. Dramatists were hardly 
ranked as poets until the publication of the works of 
Ben Jonson, in folio, about the time of Shakespeare's 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 77 

deatli. So lie was lifted out of the ordinary run of play- 
wrights. These poems, dedicated as they were to a peer 
conspicuous for his patronage of letters, opened to 
Shakespeare the door of noble and even of royal favors ; 
and the acquaintance, reacting on his work as a play- 
wright, procured him a welcome at court. He was 
commanded to produce his pieces before the Queen ; and 
tradition has it that he wrote the Merry Wives to oblige 
Elizabeth, just as his Macbeth, in subject and allusion, 
was a compliment to King James. He praises the Queen 
in certain well-known lines in the Midsummer NigMs 
Dream. The favors of his noble friends seem often to 
have been substantial ; the Earl of Southampton is re- 
ported to have given him XIOOO, — equivalent to eight 
times that amount in modern money. The custom of 
the day warrants us in supposing other gifts from other 
friends. But this intercourse brought him something far 
better than money. Patrons of letters, traveled, versed 
in all the arts and accomplishments of the day, and in 
Italian and French literature, gave to Shakespeare his 
best education, and may go far to account for those 
characters in his plays which bring before us so vividly 
the soldiers, courtiers, and great men of former time. 
The difficulty which many have found in accepting 
this Stratford yeoman's son as author of the plays that 
go under his name, and which they base on the contrast 
between Stratford schooling on the one hand and on the 
other the wealth of knowledge, experience, and observa- 
tion displayed in the dramas, vanishes when one thinks 
what an education the best society of London could give 
to a man as keen and vigorous as Shakespeare. If it be 
objected that the despised actor had no entry into this 
world of refinement, two answers are obvious. Then, as 



78 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

now, a man of parts, who could entertain by liis wit and 
please by bis fancy, was made welcome in the bouses of 
the gi'eat. Then, as now, money and property were keys 
to open almost any door. Actors made money. In a very 
different way, and to a different purpose, it was tbe 
life of London wbicb educated Dickens. Like Goetbe, 
Sbakespeare must bave been sensitive to tbe influence 
of noble women and to tbeir cbarm ; and we cannot tbink 
tbat bis splendid gallery of Portias, Rosalinds, and Imo- 
gens was witbout counterparts in tbe real life wbicb be 
saw and sbared. 

Greater difficulties are met in tbe discussion of tbe 
plays tbemselves. His London life bas actually been 
reconstructed from tbe spirit and subject of bis dra- 
matic works in tbeir probable order of production. 
Tbe facts are tbese: after bis early comedies, Lovers 
Labour 's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and 
tbe Comedy of Errors, and bis early tragedy, Romeo 
and Juliet, wbicb reflect tbe single-bearted gayety and 
single-bearted sorrow of youtb, Sbakespeare produced 
bis plays at an average rate of two every year, witb 
increasing mastery of bis art. Tbirty-seven titles are 
included in tbe wbole list. By 1594, tbe end of bis first 
or experimental period, be bad written, besides tbe plays 
just named, tbe bloody and repulsive Titus Androni- 
cus, Henry FT in its tbree parts (wbere, bowever, be 
was only collaborator and reviser), Richard LLI, and 
Richard LL. In Henry FT be bad worked witb Mar- 
lowe ; in tbe other two plays be imitated bim. His beau- 
tiful tribute, — 

"Dead Shepherd! Now I find thy saw of might : 
Who ever loved that loved not at first sight ? " — 

more than makes up for the parody of Marlowe's style 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 79 

wliich he introduced into his Henry IV. To the year 
1594 beloDg his King John and The Merchant of Ven- 
ice in its earlier, unrevised version. The playwright's 
reputation was now assured, and between this date and 
the turn of the century appeared Midsummer Night's 
Dream^ All 's Well^ Taming of the Shrew., Henry IV 
(with its popular figure of Falstaff), The Merry Wives, 
Henry Ts and three perfect comedies, Much Ado, As 
You Like It, and Twelfth Night. The turn of the cen- 
tury was marked by the building of the new theatres as 
well as by the new prosperity of the players themselves ; 
but this change is not reflected in the spirit of Shake- 
speare's dramatic work. His comedy, once so gay and 
lately so serene, becomes intricate and cloudy ; in Mea- 
sure for Measure it trembles on the verge of tragedy. 
This drama is placed about 1604, midway in that 
splendid procession of tragedies which began in 1601 
with Julius Caesar, and proceeded with Hamlet, Troi- 
lus and Cressida, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, 
till 1608, when in Timon of Athens tragedy almost 
turns to outright pessimism. This was followed by 
Shakespeare's part of Pericles and by the two Roman 
plays, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The 
final group of plays is of an entirely different stamp. 
In Cymheline, the Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, 
strong threatening of tragedy is averted, a domestic 
complication — in two cases the parting of husband 
and wife, in a third the hostility of two brothers — is 
reconciled by a woman's influence, and there is a happy 
if not a merry ending. There is no doubt that these 
plays were written at the time when Shakespeare's visits 
to Stratford grew more frequent, and his final retire- 
ment there was close at hand. One biographer suggests 



80 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

that they were written at Stratford in the summers, 
to be acted later at the Globe Theatre in London, and 
suggests that Judith Shakespeare served as model to 
her father for the charming figures of Perdita and Mi- 
randa. 

How far now we can reconstruct Shakespeare's 
London life, about which absolutely nothing is known 
in detail, from the sequence and character of his dra- 
matic work and more particularly from his personal lyric 
in the sonnets, is no easy question. The " sugred son- 
nets," which according to Francis Meres were circu- 
lated as early as 1598 among the poet's private friends, 
were published for sixpence in quarto in the year 1609 
by one Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller. The dedication 
to " Mr. W. H." has occasioned a vast amount of con- 
troversy ; but we are now concerned with the sonnets 
themselves. There is great variety of opinion. Words- 
worth says that "with this key Shakespeare unlocked 
his heart," and the majority of critics and biographers 
incline to accept the sonnets as a transcript from his 
actual life. Mr. Sidney Lee, on the other hand, noting 
in how many cases the English sonnets of that day 
proved to have been paraphrases or translations from 
foreign models, Italian or French, refuses to give to 
these anything but an artistic value. They reveal, he 
he says, nothing of the poet's actual life, only the per- 
fection of his art. 

In viewing the dramas extremes must be avoided. 
On the one hand there is no doubt that the plays stand 
for themselves and are to be explained, now on business 
grounds, — being totally objective and outside Shake- 
speare's life, as in the historical plays which were de- 
manded by the rising patriotism of England, — now on 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 81 

artistic grounds, where the poet flung himself into crea- 
tive work out of interest in his subject and from no 
similar experience of his own. Moreover, the sequence of 
mood and subject, noted above, corresponds not so much 
to the development of Shakespeare the individual as 
to the maturing powers in any artist and the course of 
most humanlives. Another factor to be considered is the 
old community of ownership in literary goods. Not only 
could several men unite, as now, to make a play, but 
one could take older plays and modify them at will. In 
Chaucer's time translating and paraphrasing were as 
creditable as authorship . But it must be remembered that 
while Shakespeare borrowed the material of his plays, 
he selected it ; and his work is anything but that of a 
copyist. Of his spontaneity of production there can be 
no doubt. The players told Ben Jonson that the poet 
" never blotted out a line " of what he had penned ; and 
his editors Heming and Condell said that " what he 
thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce 
received from him a blot in his papers." It is clear that 
he did not require great influences on his own life to 
force expression, nor need one see life tragedy in theatre 
tragedy. Undoubtedly he was a good man of business, 
and his plays were put on the stage as commercial ven- 
tures, yet Pope overstates the case when he says that 
Shakespeare — 

" For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight. 
And grew immortal in his own despite." 

There is evidence that he did care for glory and in- 
tended his works to be collected in a final shape. He 
took some steps in this direction ; and there is all the 
evidence in the world that he wrote with that deep feel- 
ing and conviction without which there can be no poetry. 



82 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

To sum up, we can tell nothing of Shakespeare's life or 
opinions directly from his plays, while in the sonnets, 
although nothing is to be taken literally, there is sure 
testimony of his serious views and a picture of his inner, 
if not of his outer, life. 

Something can also be learned of the great dramatist's 
career in London from the friends with whom he lived. 
Apart from his noble patrons already named, there were 
the playwrights with whom he worked and the comrades 
with whom he passed his leisure hours. Among the 
former were Marlowe and perhaps others of that early 
group of university-bred men, brilliant, dissolute, lack- 
ing Shakespeare's splendid self-command. The Stratford 
yeoman's son seems to have won respect and esteem on 
all sides, was praised for his " civil demeanor," and came 
to be one of the leading men of letters in the city. He 
is probably the " .^tion" in Spenser's list of contempo- 
rary poets. While in his early days he had served as 
factotum on the stage, taking this or that part at need, 
he soon became not only a leading playwright but a 
person of the highest authority in dramatic affairs gen- 
erally. It was due to him that Ben Jonson's first comedy, 
Every Man in his Humour, was performed in 1598 
against the decision of the manager of the company, 
and Shakespeare himself took the part of Old Knowell 
in this play. Furthermore, unscrupulous publishers tried 
to get readers for inferior or valueless plays by printing 
them as Shakespeare's own. At the Mermaid Tavern in 
Bread Street he met Jonson and other men of letters 
in those wit-combats recorded by Beaumont's verse and 
Fuller's prose. No amount of literary inference can 
supplant these famous descriptions of the life in which he 
actually shared. Jonson was " like a Spanish great gal- 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEAEE 83 

leon ; . . . Shakespear, with the English man-of-war, 
lesser in bulk but hghter in sailing, could turn with all 
tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds bj 
the quickness of his wit and invention." 

Shakespeare was keen in business as well as in wit, 
like some other poets of his nation. Such records of his 
career as have been discovered point to business activi- 
ties. He invested money in London and purchased 
houses and lands. In 1597 he bought the largest house 
in Stratford, and there are records of his building and 
plantings. While he did not settle here until 1611, 
we may fancy him a frequent visitor. In the same year 
that he bought New Place a lawsuit was begun by his 
father and mother for the possession of their mortgaged 
estate. Three letters, written during 1598 from Strat- 
ford, are quoted by the poet's biographers to show his 
reputation "for wealth and influence." Mr. Lee cal- 
culates that his income up to this time, due mainly to 
his pay as actor on the stage and in noblemen's houses, 
would average about $5000 a year of our money. 
With such additional gifts as his patrons made him, 
he might well seem a rich man to his Warwickshire 
friends. After 1599 his fortunes rapidly increased. 
Documents are quoted which describe the Globe Theatre, 
built in 1598, as managed by " those deserving men, 
Shakespeare, Heming, Condell, Philips and others," 
who shared in its receipts. This was a large theatre, 
and we may conclude that Shakespeare's income from 
such a source must have resulted in making him one 
of the prosperous business men of London. He was 
also a shareholder, with smaller profits, in the Black- 
friars Theatre. He had stiU other sources of income, 
and the diary of the Rev. John Ward, vicar of Strat- 



84 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ford from 1662 to 1668, records that Shakespeare in 
his last years spent at the rate of a thousand pounds a 
year. The poet figured, moreover, in numerous lawsuits, 
mainly for the recovery of debts. 

We know, then, that Shakespeare was a keen man of 
business, and that he grew rich. More than this, he 
aspired to the rank and privileges of a gentleman. His 
purchase of land in Stratford points this way, and it 
was surely in his interests that the father, John Shake- 
speare, applied for a coat-of-arms. This was obtained 
in 1599, and the poet, though his business was in Lon- 
don, was henceforth described as "of Stratford-on- 
Avon, gentleman." 

The first decade of the seventeenth century perhaps 
saw the end of Shakespeare's London career. He sold 
his shares in the two theatres, probably about 1611, 
and retired to his native town. There is no reason to 
believe that he undertook any independent dramatic or 
poetical work after this time, although his interests in 
theatrical affairs were maintained by his friendship 
with Ben Jonson and other playwrights, by his visits to 
London, and perhaps by the revision of his plays with 
a view to the publication which they finally secured 
through the good offices of his friends Heming and 
Condell. The rest of his life must be imagined on the 
basis of his general character : such incidental matters 
as are recorded — his function as god-father, his rela- 
tions with the corporation of Stratford, his entertain- 
ment of a Puritan preacher, — throw no real hght on 
the situation. 

In November, 1614, he paid his supposedly last visit 
to London ; his will was prepared in January, 1616, but 
was not signed until March. The diary of Ward, already 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 85 

cited, says that Drayton and Ben Jonson visited the 
poet about this time and " had a merry meeting." 
Another and later legend makes Shakespeare the hero 
of a carouse at Bidford, a village in the neighborhood 
of Stratford. But the parson adds that they drank too 
hard and that Shakespeare "■ died of a fever there con- 
tracted." The poet's character, however, so tolerant, so 
temperate, so averse from extremes, forbids us to accept 
without better authority the notion that he shared the 
fate of a Robert Greene. He died on the 23d of April, 
1616, a date which is generally regarded as his birth- 
day. 

As for his personal appearance, both tradition, as 
reported by Aubrey, and the portraits make him "a 
handsome, well-shaped man." These portraits have been 
much discussed, but critics now agree that the bust in 
the Stratford church and the engraved portrait prefixed 
to the first folio edition (1623) of the poet's works — 
with certificate to the likeness in Ben Jonson's " Lines 
to the Reader" — are the only portraits of Shakespeare 
which admit no doubt of genuineness. It is probable, 
though not certain, that the so-called Flower portrait, 
now hanging in the Memorial Gallery at Stratford, is 
the original painting from which this engraving for the 
first folio was made. The bust, whitewashed in 1793 
by order of Malone, the great Shakespeare editor, was 
cleaned in 1861, revealing the eyes as "light hazel" in 
color and "the hair and beard auburn." Even allowing 
for clumsy reproduction in both cases, one cannot sup- 
pose the face to have been of the highly intellectual and 
impressive type. In looks, as in manner and in character, 
the over-worked adjective "genial" wiU probably best 
describe him. " We feel sure," says Professor Raleigh, 



86 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

" children did not stop their talk when he came near 
them, but continued, in the happy assurance that it was 
only Master Shakespeare." He is rightly called the 
prince of poets because in his poetry men have found 
a wider range and a closer grasp of humanity itself than 
in the works of any other man. His poetry has defects, 
and he himself had limitations obvious enough to those 
who compare him with such a poet as Milton. He was 
neither a great moralist nor, to use Matthew Arnold's 
phrase, " a friend and aider to those who would live in 
the spirit." But in the power to interpret human life, 
in the sweep of imagination, and in the beauty and mel- 
ody of poetic speech, he stands without a peer. 



THE PURITAN AGE 

The period covered by the reign of James I (1603-25) 
has been often called the Decadence. After 1610 the 
Elizabethan flower was overblown, writers became con- 
sciously artificial, men sought new and elaborate forms 
of expression, and literature, lacking a fresh impulse, 
naturally went through a process of disintegration. 
Much of the literature of the time, especially the drama, 
became very coarse. As far as form went, the drama 
and the lyric reached great excellence, but they lacked 
the old freshness and genuineness. It was in such an 
atmosphere that the masque, an elaborate court enter- 
tainment, reached its height. 

This literature of coarseness, skillful technique, and 
little vital energy was the expression of its time, the so- 
called Jacobean Age. Against it grew up the great 
protest of Puritanism. Puritanism, in its beginnings, 
back in Elizabeth's reign, was merely an emphasis on 
individual purity. Though later associated with Pres- 
byterianism and the cause of Parliament against the 
King and the Church of England, it was properly an 
attitude of mind, not a religious sect. It did come in 
course of time, however, to be a more or less clearly de- 
fined body, embracing the severe doctrines of Calvinism. 
These, roughly speaking, were that man was by Adam's 
fall doomed to eternal punishment, but that God in his 
infinite mercy had "elected" a few to salvation. The 
whole concern of the Puritan, therefore, was the salva- 



88 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

tion of his individual soul ; it behooved him to watch and 
fast and pray, lest he lose his one chance of redemption 
or by his frivolity destroy the chances of his descendants. 
Earthly things became mere fleeting joys or sorrows, 
of no account when one's mind dwelt continually on an 
eternity of joy or of suffering. The Puritan thus grew 
into a severe and steadfast man, insensible to danger 
and fatigue. The period of dominant Puritan influence 
was from 1625, the accession of Charles I, to 1660, the 
Restoration of Charles XL 

The effect of such a body of men on literature was 
withering ; by 1640 " Merrie England " was irrevoca- 
bly buried in the past. The theatres were closed in 
1642 ; dancing, games, and all singing but psalm sing- 
ing were reprobated. The rich, sonorous service of the 
Church of England was considered an idle, wicked 
vanity. England, as Green says, became a nation of 
one book, the Bible. Puritan literature, therefore, with 
two striking exceptions, was given over to controversial 
pamphlets and sermons, both of which died for the 
most part in a few years. The two exceptions, of course, 
were Milton, who retained the artistic Elizabethan im- 
pulse, who was, as Dr. Neilson has put it, " the lasting 
proof of the possibility of the combination of Puritan- 
ism and culture," and Bunyan, who had a message for 
a whole nation. 

Puritanism, however, did not absorb every one. In- 
deed, probably less than half of the population of Eng- 
land were avowedly Puritans. There still remained 
many of the King's followers, " Cavaliers " as they were 
called, who were writing incomparable lyrics. Besides 
them, moreover, were many excellent persons, touched 
with the emphasis on personal purity, but repelled by 



THE PURITAN AGE 89 

the harsh manner, solemn garh, and sanctimonious 
speech of the extreme Puritans. These remained in the 
Church and, along with a few poetical Puritans, com- 
posed many religious lyrics. 



JOHN MILTON 

In a letter to his friend Charles Diodati, in 1637, 
Milton wrote : " He (God) has instilled into me, if into 
any one, a vehement love of the beautiful." And in 
Paradise Regained, writing of his youth, he says : — 

" When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing : all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, 
What might be public good ; myself I thought 
Born to that end, born to promote all truth, 
All righteous things. " 

These two quotations illustrate the two chief elements 
in Milton's nature, — a passionate love of the beauti- 
ful, and a not less passionate service of duty. He was 
brought up in an atmosphere of art and music, and 
chose the vocation of poet ; but when his conscience 
called he gave up his poetic delights and wrote himself 
blind in defense of his country ; yet when his years of ser- 
vice were over he retired in solitude to sing the greatest 
poem of his time. As Shakespeare's work was the con- 
summation of the Elizabethan Renaissance, so Milton's 
struck the highest note of what has been aptly called 
the Puritan Renaissance. No two centuries are of greater 
importance in English history than the sixteenth and 
seventeenth, and no two periods have had such magnifi- 
cent expression. 

Milton's birth took place in an epoch-making period. 
Queen Elizabeth had been dead five years, and with 
James a new character began to stamp itself on the 
Enghsh people. Shakespeare had by this time written 



JOHN MILTON 91 

raost of his great tragedies ; Ben Jonson was rising to 
fame ; Ealegh and Bacon had already attained renown ; 
and Oliver Cromwell, who was to be the genius of the 
Commonwealth, was a boy of nine years. When Mil- 
ton was three, the King James Bible was published ; 
and nine years later the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for 
the New World. 

The life of Milton is commonly divided for conven- 
ience into three periods : his education, life at Horton, 
and travels (1608-1639) ; civil life (1640-1660) ; 
retiremeut(1660-1674) 

Part I (1608-1639) 
The exact date of the poet's birth was December 8, 
1608. His father was John Milton, born probably in 
1563, the son of Kichard Milton of Oxfordshire, a 
Romanist. His mother, it seems, was a Sara Jeffrey 
(1573-1637) of Essex. The elder John Milton, disin- 
herited on account of Protestant beliefs, was in London 
about 1585, though nothing is known of his trade until 
about ten years later, when he started as a scrivener's 
apprentice. In five years, two less than the regular 
period of apprenticeship, he was admitted to the full 
power of scrivener, at that time a trade consisting chiefly 
in the drawing up of deeds, wills, and contracts. Mil- 
ton's father seems to have been moderately successful, 
for he soon married and settled in a comfortable house 
in Bread Street. This house, in a day when many 
houses were named like inns, was called "The Spread 
Eagle." Besides three who died in infancy, John and 
Sara Milton had three children : Anne (born between 
1602 and 1607), John (1608), and Christopher 
(1615). 



92 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Milton's boyhood was passed in tlie heart of London. 
Hard by " The Spread Eagle " was the Mermaid Tav- 
ern, famous as the haunt of great dramatists. A little 
way down Bread Street, towards the north, one came to 
Cheapside, the great shopping street which ran down to 
St. Paul's Cathedral, and not far beyond St. Paul's was 
Smithfield. On the south, only a few minutes' walk 
away, ran the Thames, with just a fringe of buildings 
on the now populous Surrey side ; and to the east rose 
London Tower. 

Milton received a good training from his earliest youth. 
His father was a skillful musician and a composer of 
some fame, and from him the boy early acquired a taste 
for music. In 1618, when he was ten, a Mr. Thomas 
Young began giving him private lessons in school work, 
which were continued till 1622, probably after Milton 
had begun attending St. Paul's School. He was at St. 
Paul's probably from 1620 till 1625. There he studied 
Latin and Greek, and possibly French, Italian, and 
Hebrew. From the first he showed skill at his books 
and tireless application — " serious to learn and know." 
" From the twelfth year of my age," he says in the 
Defensio Secunda, " I scarcely ever went from my 
lessons to bed before midnight." Among his school-fel- 
lows should be remembered Charles Diodati, with whom 
he formed a very beautiful and lasting friendship. 

On February 12, 1625, Milton was admitted a Lesser 
Pensioner to Christ's College, Cambridge. In his second 
year he had a little quarrel with his tutor, Chappell. 
He was perhaps whipped, and probably rusticated for 
a short time ; at all events, he was absent from the Uni- 
versity for a few weeks in 1626, and in a Latin poem 
to his friend Diodati speaks of Cambridge, " where my 



JOHN MILTON 93 

forbidden cell causes me little regret." He soon returned 
to favor, however, and was transferred to a Mr. Tovey's 
tutelage. His high character and his scholarly excel- 
lence won him friendship and renown, and he was often 
called upon to take part in college and university exer- 
cises. Ln 1629 he received the degree of B. A. and three 
years later was admitted to that of M. A. It is interest- 
ing to note, in connection with his future Puritanism, 
that to receive his degree Milton had to subscribe to 
the Articles of Royal Supremacy, Church Liturgy, and 
Doctrinal Standards of the Church of England. In 1635 
Oxford bestowed upon him an M. A. as an honorary 
degree. 

To follow Milton's literary career we must go back 
a few years. Until his graduation most of his work was 
in Latin, but he had already in 1632 written English 
poems, some of great promise. Paraphrases of P&alms 
C XIV and CXXXVI^ written about the time of his 
leaving St. Paul's, were his first efforts. On the Death 
of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough (probably his 
niece) was written in 1626. In 1629 he wrote his Ode 
on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, his first really 
great poem, which admitted him, only twenty-one, to 
a high rank among poets. In 1630 came The Passion 
(a fragment), and in 1632 his Epitaph on Shake- 
speare, published among the verses prefixed to the 
Shakespeare Folio of that year. In 1631 he wrote two 
poems on Hobson, the famous university carrier, who 
had driven his coach to London when Shakespeare w^as 
a boy. They were meant to be humorous, but humor 
was not Milton's affair. To the same year belong his 
Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester and, far 
more significant, his Sonnet On Having Arrived at 



94 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

the Age of Twenty-three, in which he dedicates himself 
to the public service already hinted at. Of his many 
Latin epistles, elegies, and dissertations, the seven 
Prolusiones Oratoriae (Oratorical Exercises), not pub- 
lished till 1674, are the most famous. About the time 
of his leaving Cambridge he wrote a Latin poem, Ad 
Patrem, in which he explains to his father his choice 
of poetry as a vocation. 

Milton is described as being at this time (1632) 
under middle height, with a fair complexion, dark gray 
eyes, and auburn hair. His personal appearance, coupled 
with the purity of his character, had won him the 
nick-name of " Lady of Christ's." Yet it must not be 
thought from this that he was of a soft, yielding dispo- 
sition. Gentle he undoubtedly was, in the better sense 
of the term, but no man was more fearless in expres- 
sion of his opinions, no man resented more openly inter- 
ference with intellectual freedom. He had, moreover, a 
confidence in his calling, a consciousness of his high 
task ; " from the first," says Lowell, " he looked upon 
himself as a man dedicated and set apart." In speaking 
of his youth, Milton says : " Only this my mind gave 
me, that every free and gentle spirit, without that oath, 
ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the 
gilt spur or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder to 
stir him up both by his counsel and his arms, to secure 
and protect the weakness of any attempted chastity." 
And in the same account : " I was confirmed in this 
opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to 
write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself 
to be a true poem ; that is, a composition and pattern 
of the honourabliest things ; not presuming to sing high 
praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have 



JOHN MILTON 95 

in himself the experience and the practice of all that 
which is praiseworthy." Such was the lofty standard 
that the young poet set himself, and such the "high 
seriousness " with which he judged of his qualification. 
" He had an ambition," says Professor Masson, "to be 
not merely a poeta, but a vates.''^ 

Milton had been destined, as were most young men 
of his scholarly attainments, for the Church, but a letter 
written about 1632 shows that he felt unprepared 
for the work ; though he says nothing of objection to 
doctrines, he yet prefers to wait. By 1637 Lycidas, 
in the picture of the corrupted clergy, gives a more 
positive attitude ; and in 1641 his words in T%e Reason 
of Church- Government leave no doubt. "Perceiving," 
he says, " what tyranny had invaded the Church, — that 
he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take 
an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience 
that would retch, he must either straight perjure or 
split his faith, — I thought it better to prefer a blame- 
less silence before the sacred office of speaking bought 
and begun with servitude and forswearing." 

So, instead of taking orders, Milton went to live 
with his father, who, comfortably successful, had retired 
about 1632 to a country place at Horton, in Bucking- 
hamshire. The country there is mostly flat pasture-land, 
with full-flowing streams and many little runnels, 
branches of the river Colne. On the west rise the towers 
of Windsor Castle. At Horton, in reading and study, 
Milton passed most of the following five years. Here 
he lived the lives of his own Allegro and Pense- 
roso, developing his sympathy with nature and increas- 
ing his vast store of classical knowledge. Occasionally 
he made short trips to London, chiefly, he says, to study 



96 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

mathematics and music. There he met Henry Lawes, 
the great musician, who was soon to play an important 
part in his life. 

While at Horton Milton composed most of the so- 
called Minor Poems (published together in 1646). 
In 1632 L'' Allegro and 11 Penseroso were written. 
In the following year came the Song on a May Morn- 
ing, the Sonnet on a Nightingale, and At a Solemn 
Music, and in 1634 the two poems, On Time and 
Upon the Circumcision. 

Arcades and Comus, the masques, have a special 
significance. The masque was a musical dramatic per- 
formance given privately in honor of some great or 
noble person, and it is important to realize that Milton, 
the well-to-do scrivener's son, had come into sufficient 
acquaintanceship with such people to be asked to take 
part in composing their masques. Arcades, conducted 
chiefly by Lawes, in honor of the Countess of Derby, a 
lady praised in verse ever since Elizabethan days, con- 
tains a small literary part which Lawes asked Milton 
to write. The date was probably 1633 or 1634. Co- 
mus, a much longer and more famous piece, was acted 
in 1634 at Ludlow Castle, in honor of the stepson of 
the Countess of Derby, the Earl of Bridgewater, who 
had recently been nominated Lord President of Wales. 
Possibly Milton was present at the performance, in which 
case he must have actually seen the western part of 
England, with which he shows so much familiarity. In 
1637 Lawes, who had written the music for Comus, 
published the whole piece. 

In the same year as the publication of Comus, three 
important pieces of writing came from Milton's pen, — 
two letters to his friend Diodati, and his famous elegy 



JOHN MILTON 97 

Lycidas^ in memory of his college friend Edward 
King, " unfortunately drown'd in his passage from 
Chester on the Irish Seas." Both the letters and Lyci- 
das are interesting in connection with the poet's bio- 
graphy. In the letter of September 23 he says : "And 
what am I doing ? Growing my wings and meditating 
flight ; but as yet our Pegasus raises himself on very 
tender pinions. Let us be lowly wise." At the same 
time that these words show Milton's faith in his calling 
they indicate a characteristic modesty, a conviction that 
he had not as yet struck his true note, that he must 
*' scorn dehghts and live laborious days " to prepare him- 
self for a flight of song truly " above th' Aonian Mount." 
Indeed, he had intended to cease writing poetry till he 
had trained himself to pursue " Things unattempted yet 
in prose or rhyme." Hence it is that Lycidas begins 
with an apology for once more taking to verse. His 
friend's death, he felt, justified the step. 

The most important autobiographical passages in 
Lycidas^ however, as well as in Comus, are those in- 
terpreting Milton's character in the growing austerity 
of the times. In Comus the Enchanter has no real 
power over the lost Lady because she is fortified by 
innocence and purity ; and the moral of the poem is : 

" Love Virtue, she alone is free." 

In Lycidas the two digressions are significant. The 
first, on Fame, might have occurred to any serious, 
high-minded person ; at this time Milton's Puritanism 
found expression in personal purity rather than in op- 
position to government. Little by little, however, he 
was drawing away from the pleasure-loving Cavaliers ; 
the ways had parted ; ahead he saw a life of serious 



98 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

toil. In the digression on the Church he is more out- 
spoken. There may be " prophetic strain " in his as- 
surance at the end, whether he means the axe of the 
gospel, or the two houses of Parliament, or what, that 

" That two-handed engine at the door 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." 

Lycidas is the clearly marked conclusion of Milton's 

earlier work ; his middle and later life were in truth 

in " pastures new." 

That Milton, with such conjectured forebodings of 
future strife, should have gone to Italy indicates at 
least how strongly the Elizabethan artist survived in 
him. Italy, with its storehouses of antiquity, with its 
long roll of illustrious painters and poets, was a Mecca 
to a man of his nature. In the spring of 1638, there- 
fore, when nothing very definite called at home, he 
started on his tour. One's imagination is not likely to 
overestimate the deep impression that Italy and the 
men there made on the young scholar. Armed with 
many letters, — particularly from Sir Henry Wotton 
and his friend Lawes, — he found no difficulty in gain- 
ing entrance into the highest circles, whether of society 
or learning, and his scholarship and personality won 
him many complimentary letters and poems. 

Milton went first to Paris, where he met the great 
Hugo Grotius, Dutch philosopher and theologian, at 
that time banished from his own country and serving 
as ambassador for Sweden. From Paris the poet trav- 
eled via Genoa and Pisa, in August, 1638, to Florence. 
After two months at Florence, in which he met Galileo, 
the old blind astronomer, now a captive in his own 
villa "for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the 
Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought," Milton 



JOHN MILTON 99 

journeyed to Rome, where lie stayed about two months 
and heard Leonora Baroni sing. Arriving in Naples 
late in November, 1638, he made there a warm friend- 
ship with Manso, the munificent patron of letters. 
Milton had intended to proceed thence to Sicily and 
Greece, but on receiving news of the war between the 
Scotch Covenanters and Charles I he gave up these 
projects ; " for I considered it base," he says, " that, 
while my countrymen were fighting at home for liberty, 
I should be traveling abroad at ease for intellectual 
culture." Yet he did not hurry straight home. Warned 
against a second visit to Rome, on account of the dan- 
ger his outspoken Protestantism had already brought 
him, he went willfully thither and expressed freely his 
views. Luckily he escaped the " grim wolf " of Rome, 
and arrived about March, 1639, in Florence. There he 
remained till the end of April, renewing his old ac- 
quaintances and taking part in the exercises of the 
many Accademie. Then, hurrying through Bologna 
and Ferrara, he arrived at Venice early in May. His 
five Italian sonnets and one canzone were perhaps writ- 
ten at this time, for they show a familiarity with the 
region about Bologna, though the brief visit to that 
town and our ignorance of the lady, if she was a real 
person, to whom they were addressed, makes this only 
conjecture. From Venice Milton traveled home via 
Geneva, the home of Diodati's relatives, and Paris, 
reaching England about August 1, 1639. To his own 
account of the journey, given in the Defensio Secunda, 
he adds : "I again take God to witness that in all 
those places, where so many things are considered law- 
ful, I lived sound and untouched from all profligacy 
and vice, having the thought perpetually with me that, 

I. OF a 



100 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

though I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly 
could not escape the eyes of God." 

On reaching England, Milton was at first busied 
with thoughts of his dearest friend, Charles Diodati, 
who had died in August, 1638, and probably late in 
the autumn of 1639 he wrote the famous Latin elegy, 
Epitaphium Damonis. In this poem Milton refers to 
his own literary projects, particularly a long epic on 
the story of King Arthur. His notes made at this time 
reveal, moreover, numerous schemes ; they include plans 
for a dramatic form of Paradise Z/OSt, sixty-one sub- 
jects taken from the Bible, thirty-three from English 
history, and five from Scottish. 

Part II (1640-1660) 

To follow the turn which Milton's life now takes it 
is necessary to keep in mind the main developments in 
Church and state. It is essential to remember, above 
all, that Puritanism grew first out of an emphasis 
on purity, that many early Puritans remained in the 
Church of England, — witness Milton's father, — and 
that it was only after the gradual assimilation of Cal- 
vinism and after the political developments between 
Charles I, who thought himself the " deputy elected by 
the Lord," and Parliament, which found its rights openly 
violated, that the great body of Puritans opposed them- 
selves to the English Church. Then, indeed, matters 
hastened to strife ; for the Puritans, who disliked idle 
shows and much ritual, were especially provoked by 
Archbishop William Laud, a man who, Macaulay says, 
had " a childish passion for mummeries." At the same 
time Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, developed 
his policy of " Thorough." Charles dismissed Parlia- 



JOHN MILTON 101 

ment ; rules of doctrine and conformity were published ; 
taxes were increased ; emigration to America was for- 
bidden. From March, 1629, to April, 1640, the King's 
Ministry and Privy Council, with its Star-Chamber and 
Court of High Commission, was the sole legislative 
body. Finally the King, with an untrained and discon- 
tented army, with no Parliament to fall back on, and 
with the well-trained Scots marching against him in 
battle, was compelled to call the Long Parliament. To 
his dismay it at once set about the trial of his creatures 
who had shared with him the spoils of eleven years. 
Mattel's got beyond his control ; Wentworth was brought 
to the block in 1641, and Laud to the Tower, and in 
1642 civil war broke out. 

When the civil war began aU England and Scotland 
were involved, and it hence became necessary for every 
one to take sides. The King, who was at first successful, 
numbered among his followers many of the best men 
of the day. It is as unfair to judge of the Royahsts by 
the profligate rabble, which did nevertheless belong to 
them, as it is to judge of the Puritans by their extreme 
fanatics. The Royalists were thorouglily in earnest ; 
they believed, as Professor Wendell has pointed out, in 
the royal right no less than the Parliamentarians in their 
inalienable rights. With them stood courtesy, chivalry, 
and the traditions of their fathers. The Parliamen- 
tarians, on the other hand, inspired by the ideals of 
liberty and justice, were impelled for the most part by 
religious zeal. Cromwell and his " God-fearing " men, 
rolling their battle-hymn " strong and great against the 
sky," were invincible foes. 

It was not unnatural, moreover, that the Church, 
with its increased respect for forms and traditions, 



102 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

should have become one with the Royalists, and that 
the Puritans, with their zeal for religious liberty, should 
have joined the Parliamentarians. Among these Puri- 
tans were many Independents, men unwilling to accept 
Presbyterianism as the only alternative to Prelacy. 
Roughly speaking, however, all the parties may be re- 
solved into two great divisions, — King and Church 
against Parliament and Puritanism. The one was made 
a fact by Charles' Star-Chamber and Laud's Court of 
High Commission ; the other, expressing at once the 
protest of Independent and Presbyterian, was made a 
fact in 1643 by the Solemn League and Covenant be- 
tween England and Scotland. 

Milton's position, if the tendencies of his youth are 
kept in mind, should now be clear. He was brought 
up as an old-time Puritan in the Established Church 
and had a deep veneration for the beauties of music, 
art, and literature. But he could never bow down before 
such things ; and when Laud and his Prelates seemed to 
be doing so, Milton, it will be remembered, did not see 
his way clear to taking orders ; he was, in his own words, 
" Church-outed by the Prelates." It was above all the 
sacred principle of liberty which chiefly drove him to 
his choice of sides. He lingered fondly with the bright 
splendors of his youth ; he held back from the ugly, 
extravagant harshness of the later Puritanism. When, 
however, a choice was necessary, when he saw that lib- 
erty was the cause of Parliament against the tyranny 
of Church and King, he did not hesitate a moment. 
Throwing aside all the artistic delights which must have 
tugged so strongly at his heartstrings, he nobly chose for 
Parliament. In so doing he allied himself with all the 
harsher forms of Puritanism and with Presbyterianism, 



JOHN MILTON 103 

But he did not become a Presbyterian. At first, to be 
sure, as is shown in his early pamphlets, he looked on 
Presbyterianism as the only alternative, but that he 
soon saw the futility of his hope is clear from his poem 
On the New Forcers of Conscience (1647), in which 
he says : " New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." 
Yet to be effective it was necessary to take sides, and 
so John Milton cast in his lot with the Presbyterians. 
" He fought their perilous battle," says Macaulay, 
" but he turned away with disdain from their insolent 
triumph." Purity and Liberty were, in short, the ten- 
ets of his creed ; he was a Puritan of the elder time 
and an Independent ; " in the ordinary sense of that 
much-abused term," says Dr. Garnett, "no Puritan, 
but a most free and independent thinker, the vast 
sweep of whose thought happened to coincide for a 
while with the narrow orbit of so-called Puritanism." 
On returning to England in 1639, Milton did not 
at once take active part in the struggle, but, renting 
lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard, began a small school, 
in which he taught his two nephews and one or two 
other pupils. Dr. Johnson has hence charged him with 
*' great promises and small performances." It is per- 
haps fairer to remember Wordsworth's words, — 

" Thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay." 

The time was not yet ripe. His was not a fight with 
the sword, and his pen generally demanded some imme- 
diate impulse. This soon came, however, and produced 
the long line of prose writings, Latin and English, in 
which he steadily upheld the cause of liberty. He had 
moved about 1640 from St. Bride's Churchyard to a 
" pretty garden-house " in Aldersgate Street, and here 



104 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

in 1641 and 1642 he wrote the five pamphlets setting 
forth his views on church government. 

The next series of pamphlets had a very real im- 
pulse in his own marriage. In June, 1643, he married 
Mary Powell, a girl of seventeen, daughter of an Ox- 
fordshire squire who was a debtor of Milton's father. 
A month after a visit to Oxfordshire, perhaps to col- 
lect interest, Milton returned with his bride. His wife, 
however, being " used to a great house, and much com- 
pany and joviality," did not take kindly to the austere 
Puritan household in Aldersgate Street, and before 
a month was out returned to her parents. By let- 
ter she obtained permission to remain away till the 
following Michaelmas. Michaelmas come, however, she 
did not return, and Milton, says his nephew Phillips, 
" thought it would be dishonorable ever to receive her 
again." Whereupon, Phillips adds, Milton wrote his 
first treatise on Divorce — that is, after Michaelmas. 
But Professor Masson has fixed the date of this pam- 
phlet as early as August 1, 1643. Pattison suggests 
that Milton may have been " occupying himself with 
an argument in favor of divorce for incompatibility of 
temper, during the honeymoon." The pamphlet was 
written hurriedly, however, as we know Milton did 
write when the impulse was on him, and it is probable 
that he wrote it, in bitter disappointment, right after 
the separation, which took place some time in July. 
During the next two years he added three pamphlets 
on the same subject. 

Concerning all Milton's relations to his first wife 
we are unfortunately in possession only of facts un- 
pleasantly suggestive. In the summer of 1645 he was 
paying his addresses to one of Dr. Davis's daughters, 



JOHN MILTON 105 

and yet late the same summer he was reconciled to his 
wife. That great happiness ever entered the household 
is unlikely, though there is no knowledge of a second 
quarrel. Milton's ideal of marriage, like his ideal of 
education, was too lofty and impractical to be realized 
in any but a Utopian state. " He for God only, she 
for God in him " explains his attitude better than pages 
of comment. Mistress Milton died in 1653, having 
given birth to a son who died in childhood and to three 
daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah. 

In 1643 Milton's aged father came to live with him, 
and in September, 1645, after the reconciliation with 
his wife, the growing family moved to a more com- 
modious dwelling in the Barbican, just off Aldersgate 
Street. To this period (1643-45) belong his pamphlet 
on Education, adressed as a letter to Samuel Hartlib, 
a German-Pole, and his most famous pamphlet, the 
Areopagitica ; a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing. " God intended to prove me," he says boldly, 
" whether 1 durst take up alone a rightful cause against 
a world of disesteem, and found I durst." Itself unli- 
censed, the Areopagitica put Milton for some time in 
danger of the law. It was about the same time that he 
collected and brought out the so-called 1645 edition of 
his poems (not actually published tiU January 2,1646, 
N. S.), including L' Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, 
Arcades, Lycidas, his first ten sonnets, and most of his 
Latin poems. 

It is again necessary to revert to public events. Though 
the Royalists had been at first successful, they were com- 
pletely routed in the battles of Marston Moor and 
Naseby, and Parliament held control. In 1645 Laud 
was executed, and in 1646 Charles surrendered himself 



106 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

to the Scots, who promptly sold him to the English for 
.£400,000. But the Parliament, now that the King was 
secured, found itself confronted by the difficulty of 
governing many contending parties. For several years 
England was without any real executive. The West- 
minster Assembly, filled with zealous Presbyterians, 
imposed a regime in many ways as distasteful as that 
of the old Prelacy. The army, however, was the strong- 
est party; in 1647 it seized Charles, and on January 
30, 1649, put him to death. 

It is necessary only to remind the reader of events 
from this time on, — how Parliament was reduced to 
the " Rump ; " how Cromwell, the man of the hour, mas- 
terfully imposed on disunited England a severe mili- 
tary despotism, expelled the Rump, was made Lord 
Protector (in 1653), and raised his country to the first 
rank among great nations ; and how — soon after his 
death — England slipped back to easy ways and rejoi- 
cingly called King Charles II to the throne. 

On February 13, 1649, just two weeks after the 
execution of Charles, Milton published The Tenure of 
£lngs and Magistrates, proving that it is laiqful . . . 
for any who have the poiver to call to account a tyrant 
or wicked King , and after due conviction to depose and 
put Mm to death. Dr. Garnett points out that this is 
to hand over the law to Judge Lynch ; in its unpractical 
idealism it is very characteristic of Milton. It is sig- 
nificant, however, that the author of the pamphlet was ^ 
sufficiently known to be made on March 15, 1649, Sec- 
retary for Foreign Tongues. While Milton's influence 

^ Space does not permit an adequate description of the Common- 
■wealth. The student should read at least the account in Green's Shorter 
History of England and Macaulay's arraignment of Charles in the Es- 
say on Milton. 



JOHN MILTON 107 

in the Commonwealth has often been greatly over-esti- 
mated, he was nevertheless, as an able controversialist 
and one of the best Latin scholars in England, a man 
much desired by the Commonwealth. His duties were 
the preparation of addresses, the writing of letters to 
foreign states, and the defense by pamphlet of the Com- 
monwealth. 

Milton's public position under these conditions again 
needs justification. There has been much shaking of 
heads over the support given by the champion of lib- 
erty to a despotism so complete as Cromwell's. But his 
choice lay, as Macaulay has well expressed it, " not be- 
tween Cromwell and liberty, but between Cromwell 
and the Stuarts." With the certainty of losing his fast- 
failing sight in the work, he accepted the position ; and 
it is fair to believe that the ideal of service prompted 
him more than pride of place. Indeed, his private choice 
had been "some still removed place," — perhaps back 
at Horton, hidden " from day's garish eye." 

Milton was soon called upon to defend the Common- 
wealth. To the Eihon Basilihe he replied, October, 
1649, in Elkonoklastes. Soon after appeared Defensio 
Regia pro Carolo J, from the pen of a Frenchman, 
Claudius Salmasius, one of the chief knights of the 
controversial field. Milton, per order, met and routed 
his opponent with his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano 
(1651). Salmasius died while writing his reply, but 
the contest was continued by one Morus (or More), 
a Scotchman living in France, who brought out Peter 
Dumoulin's defense of the Frenchman. Milton, though 
he had totally lost his sight in March, 1652, replied 
in his Defensio Secunda (May, 1654). This pamphlet 
is especially interesting because, in defending his own 



108 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

character, Milton gives a fairly complete account of 
his own youth. 

Since the Barbican days Milton's changes of resi- 
dence had been frequent. In 1647 he moved to High 
Holborn, and before entering his official appartraents 
in Whitehall, in 1649, for some months after his ap- 
pointment as Secretary he lived at Charing Cross. In 
December, 1651, he made another change on account 
of his health, this time to Petty France, Westminster. 
Here he remained till he lost his position, in April, 
1660. 

In November, 1656, Milton married his second wife, 
Katharine Woodcock. Fifteen months later she and 
her child died. In Sonnet XXIII, picturing a dream, 
he says : — 

" Methought I saw my late espoused saint 
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave." 

It is pleasant to think that the brief happiness of this 
second union may have made up in part for the disap- 
pointments of the first. 

Throughout the period of the Commonwealth Mil- 
ton's prose work continued. In 1655 came another reply 
to Morus, in 1659 two more pamphlets on church mat- 
ters, and, in March, 1660, only two months before the 
bells rang in Charles II, the Ready and Easy Way 
to Establish a Free Commonwealth. Altogether he 
wrote twenty-five pamphlets, of which four are in Latin. 
The only English outlet for his poetic feeling during 
this time of service was in his Sonnets, all of which, 
twenty-three in number, had been written by 1658. 
These, aside from their high literary merit, are impor- 
tant as showing the poet's political and religious views. 
Nowhere else does the large-minded Independent stand 



JOHN MILTON 109 

out so clear. " Avenge, O Lord," he cries in the sonnet 
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655), — 

" Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones 
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold." 

He attacks, too, the " New Forcers of Conscience ; " ad- 
dresses the Lord General Fairfax, — 

" Whose name in arms through Europe rings ; " 
and reminds Cromwell, " our chief of men," that — 

" Peace hath her victories 
No less renown'd than War." 

Among these sonnets, also, are found some of his most 
personal poems, such as that On His Blindness^ with 
its great conclusion, — 

" They also serve who only stand and wait." 

Part III (1660-1674) 

Unspeakably sad is the picture of the defeated cham- 
pion of liberty, now surrounded by the shallow mocker- 
ies of the Restoration. Yet for him the conflict had been 
infinitely significant ; it produced Paradise Lost. He 
was no longer the accomplished, scholarly poet who had 
written Comus and Lycidas. He had passed through 
twenty years of toil and trial, civil and domestic ; he 
had run the race, he had fought the good fight — and, 
what is more, he had kept the faith. Those were 
big times in which Milton had lived, when a whole 
nation was stirred to its uttermost depths, when to live 
was to fight ; and the old blind poet was scarred deep 
with the fierceness of the onset. To string together 
pretty verses about King Arthur had now been almost 
blasphemous ; after his deep experience and in his infi- 
nite sorrow there was only one theme suited to his pen ; 



110 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

he of all men in England was best prepared and tried 
for the high task, — to sing " Of man's first disobe- 
dience," and " To justify the ways of God to men." 

The first few months of the Restoration were spent 
by Milton, who was in danger of the proscriptions 
against supporters of the Commonwealth, in hiding in 
Bartholomew Close. On June 16 his writings against 
Charles I were ordered to be burned, but he himself, 
whether from pity for his blindness and reverence for 
his position as poet, or from his comparative insignifi- 
cance politically, escaped proscription, though he was 
arrested, charged exorbitant fees, and detained by the 
Sergeant-at-Arms till the Commons ordered his release 
on December 15. From then on he was a free man, 
but forced to live, especially at first, in considerable 
obscurity. His fortunes had been reduced to about 
X1500. He accordingly took a little house in Holborn, 
near Red Lion Fields, but moved in 1661 to Jewin 
Street. In 1664 he moved again, to Artillery Walk, 
Bunhill Fields. Here he lived until his death, except 
for the year 1665, when to escape the plague he took 
a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire, and 
a few weeks in 1670, when he stayed at the house of 
the bookseller Millington, in Little Britain. 

In February, 1663, Milton married for the third 
time. His wife, Elizabeth MinshuU, whom he never 
saw, was recommended by a friend. Dr. Paget. She, it 
seems, appreciated the old man's needs and was content 
with the position of housekeeper. Living in the house 
with them were Milton's three daughters, whom he con- 
sidered very undutiful children. Though he had never 
properly educated them, he expected them to enjoy tak- 
ing down his dictation and reading five or six hours a 



JOHN MILTON 111 

day in languages which they could not understand. Still, 
exacting as he was, one can conceive of no nobler duty 
for a sympathetic child than a share in the work of a 
blind father's genius. But they chose rather to bring 
sorrow on his gray hairs and to win the reproaches of 
posterity. They connived with the maidservant " to 
cheat him in her marketings ; " they even sold some of 
his books to ragwomen ; and when one of them heard 
of his prospective marriage she replied she had sooner 
heard of his death. 

In 1667 Paradise Lost was published. It had been 
planned much earlier, as we have seen, in dramatic 
form. The main work was probably begun, however, 
about 1658, and the manuscript was practically com- 
plete in 1663. The poem was published first in ten 
books, but by a rearrangement it assumed in the edi- 
tion of 1674 its final form of twelve books. Milton's 
dictation was spasmodic. He told his nephew PhiUips 
" that his vein never happily flowed but from the autum- 
nal equinoctial to the vernal." When he was in the 
vein, he " would dictate ten, twenty, or thirty lines at a 
time to any one that was near and could write." When 
he dictated " he sat leaning backward obliquely in an 
easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it." At 
times the song came upon him " with a certain impetus 
and cestro,^^ when, " at what hour soever, he rung for 
his daughter to secure what came." Thomas EUwood, 
a young Quaker, was a frequent visitor and was in the 
habit of reading to Milton and of taking down his dic- 
tation, with more eagerness than the un dutiful daugh- 
ters. 

Among the many incidents connected with the con- 
temporary fame of Paradise Lost was Milton's re- 



112 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

mark to Dryden, when the latter asked permission to 
bring out a rhymed dramatic version of the poem. 
" Ay," he said, " tag my verses if you will." Thomas 
Ellwood, the Quaker, on seeing the completed form of 
the poem, asked, " What hast thou to say of Paradise 
Found ? " And in 1771 Paradise Regained, the sequel 
to Paradise Lost, came out. It is, however, not so 
great as the epic of man's fall ; sin, error, and defeat 
had burned more strongly than redemption into Mil- 
ton's Puritan mind ; Paradise Lost was more element- 
ally, more vitally a part of his own experience than 
Paradise Regained. 

During these last years Milton's mind was remark- 
ably active. A Latin Grammar (1669) ; ^History of 
Britain, from the earliest time to the Norman Conquest, 
famous especially for the Faithorne portrait of the 
author (1670) ; Paradise Regained and Samson Ago- 
nistes, A Dramatic Poem (1671); a Latin treatise 
on the Art of Logic (1672) ; a second edition of his 
poems, and a pamphlet on True Religion, Hoeresie, 
Schism, and Toleration (1673) ; a second edition of 
Paradise Lost (1674), — these are the publications of 
his last five years, though Paradise Lost, of course, as 
well as two thirds of the History, had been written be- 
fore 1669. He approaches nearest to the level of his 
great epic in Samson Agonistes, a subject peculiarly 
appropriate to the last sad years of the old Inde- 
pendent. In 1682 was published a Brief History of 
Muscovia, written by him probably in the first years 
of his secretaryship. Not till 1823 was his Latin trea- 
tise, De Doctrina Christiana, discovered. It is one 
of his most important prose works, revealing his faith 
towards the end in the Bible and the Inner Spirit. 



JOHN MILTON 113 

Of tlie last years of Milton, at his house in Bunhill 
Fields, we have many accounts. One Dr. Wright, says 
Eichardson, found him in a room " hung with rusty 
green," " sitting in an elbow chair, black clothes, and 
neat enough, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and 
fingers gouty and with chalk-stones." In sunny weather 
he sat in a gray coarse cloth coat at the door, and 
" received the visits of people of distinguished parts, 
as well as quality." At eight o'clock he took supper, 
" which was usually olives or some light thing ; and 
after supper he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of 
water, and went to bed." Particularly did he enjoy 
music in his last days. In religion he held aloof from 
aU sects, partly on account of his blindness, partly from 
a disgust for their formalities. 

In 1674 Milton's gout grew worse, and on the 8th of 
November he died, "with so little pain that the time of 
his expiring v/as not perceived by those in the room." 
He was buried beside his father, in the parish church 
of St. Giles, Cripplegate. 

Milton the man impresses us perhaps as much as 
Milton the poet. His intensity of emotion and his 
passionate earnestness were no doubt characteristic of 
the age, but the great scope of his thought and the 
unwavering nobility of his purpose set him apart from 
and above all the men about him except Cromwell. 
Yet by the unpractical idealism of everything he 
thought or wrote he was precluded from very great 
effectiveness among his contemporaries. He was only a 
" Puritan by the accident of his times," says Dr. Gar- 
nett, " whose true affinities were with Mill and Shelley 
and Rousseau." From his childhood he saw the clear 
light of duty before him, and with an uncompromising 



114 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

earnestness lie performed that duty. Yet he was a poet, 
too, with " a vehement love of the beautiful," and he 
turned in his old age to complete the great work of his 
life. Great dramas there have been, but few tragedies 
more sublime or elemental than that of the life of John 
Milton, written across the page of history. And in 
the closing lines of Samson Agonistes, his last great 
poem, he sets down for us the abiding moral of his own 
tragedy : — 

" His servants He, with new acquist 
Of true experience from this great event, 
With peace and consolation hath dismissed^ 
And calm of mind, all passion spent." 



JOHN BUNYAN 

Pilgeim's Progress, one of the few books that 
successive generations and whole nations read, is writ- 
ten, the title-page says, " in the similitude of a dream." 
Every man has visions and spiritual conflicts in some 
degree, even in the most frivolous, worldly times. Few 
ages, however, have been so wholly given over to reli- 
gious dreams and aspirations as was the Puritan Age 
of the seventeenth century ; and of all the earnest 
struggles for salvation in that time of zeal, despair, 
and ecstasy, few were so real as Bunyan's, few visions 
were so clear as his, no book expressed so forcibly as his 
the sincere effort of the soul. His " dream " became at 
once the true record and the satisfying answer for half a 
nation. For to Bunyan and the Puritans salvation was 
literally and absolutely the only concern of this world, 
a matter of terrible moment. 

Bunyan's book, then, the record of his struggle and 
victory, must interest all who realize that in it they 
can see how the man was made. He himself, like Chris- 
tian, had escaped from the specious advice of Mr. 
Worldly Wiseman ; he had been deserted by Pliable 
at the Slough of Dispond ; he had descended into the 
Valley of Humiliation and wrestled with the monster 
Apollyon ; he had passed safely through the alluring 
shows of Vanity Fair; he had known just such judges 
as those who condemned Faithful ; he had met, too, 
with Hopeful, through whose aid he endured the dun- 
geon of Doubting Castle ; and he had come through, 



116 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

scarred and victorious, to the " pleasant land of Beu- 
lah," whence the Two Shining Ones were soon to con- 
duct him across the River of Death to the Holy City. 

John Bunyan was born in a cottage just outside of 
the hamlet of Elstow, in Bedfordshire, late in the 
year 1628. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a tinker 
in very poor circumstances, and his mother, Margaret 
Bentley, was of as low an estate. Nothing is known of 
John's education, though it is supposed, since he could 
read and write, that he went for a time to the village 
school. His book learning, however, was very slight ; 
even in later life his reading was confined almost 
wholly to the Bible and Foxe's Booh of Jfartyrs. 
While he was still a boy he began to help his father, 
whose trade he followed throughout his life. 

Bunyan, in his Grace Abounding, the most auto- 
biographical of his works, says that he was a hopeless 
sinner as a boy, — "filled with unrighteousness," with 
" but few equals both for cursing, swearing, lying, and 
blaspheming the holy name of God," " the very ring- 
leader in all manner of vice and ungodliness." It was 
hence for some time the fashion to suppose that the 
author of Pilgrim'' s Progress was a converted repro- 
bate, — a particular example of God's grace. Later 
biographers, however, have realized that Bunyan' s con- 
demnation of his youthful practices as unpardonable 
was the result of a morbid conscience. He was not 
the first godly person, in his " awakening," to con- 
sider himself the most miserable of sinners. At all 
events, " The four chief sins of which he was guilty," 
says Macaulay, " were dancing, ringing the bells of the 
parish church, playing at tipcat, and reading the history 
of Sir Bevis of Southampton." Such, the same author 



JOHN BUNYAN 117 

says in another place, " would have passed for virtues 
with Archbishop Laud." 

When he was a boy of about seventeen Bunyan 
served as a soldier. It has been said that he was at the 
siege of Leicester and on the side of Parliament, but 
he himself says another was sent in his place, and 
there is only probability in favor of his having been in 
Cromwell's army. There is, indeed, no knowledge that 
he saw actual fighting. When the armies were dis- 
banded in 1646 he returned to his father's trade at 
Elstow. 

Besides the mere incidents of his life, there is really 
only one thing to tell about Bunyan — the story of his 
conversion and its results. His spiritual conflict, begin- 
ning when he was about twenty and lasting for about 
seven years, brought forth a new man ; thence grew his 
influential ministry, his imprisonment for conscience' 
sake, and his great book. 

The struggle seems to have begun in earnest shortly 
after his marriage, about 1648. He had been troubled 
as a boy by religious visions, " fearful dreams," he says, 
" apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits ; " but his 
unremitting contest with evil really dates from his 
marriage. Nothing is known of his first wife except that 
she was a "godly person" and brought as dowry two 
religious books which he fell to reading. From the 
parish church, which he had begun to attend, he went 
home one Sunday with a " great burden " on him. But 
by afternoon he had forgotten the sermon and was off 
to the village green, where he led the lads of Elstow in 
the innocuous sport of " tip-cat " or " sly." Just as he 
was going to give the " cat " a second blow, however, he 
heard a voice from heaven asking whether " he would 



118 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go 
to hell." This only shook him a little ; he soon resolved 
that he was " past pardon" and that he might as well 
sin to his heart's content. But his heart was far from 
content ; the leaven was at work. Rebuked by a woman 
for " the ungodliest fellow for swearing that she ever 
heard," he managed to leave off swearing, to his " great 
wonder." Soon he began to read the Bible in earnest. 

The regeneration was not, however, of even growth. 
At times he relapsed into what he later considered his 
hopeless depravity. The Bible filled him with hopes and 
fears and terrible visions. Sometimes he felt the 
devil pulling at his back when he tried to pray. If he 
had faith, the Bible told him, he could work miracles. 
Once, when " the temptation came hot " upon him to try 
this promise, he was about to say to the puddles in the 
road, " Be dry," and to the dry places, " Be ye puddles ;" 
but he was saved by the thought that it might be better 
to go under the hedge and pray to God to help him. 
While he was praying, he saw that his failure to work mir- 
acles would not so much prove the falseness of the Bible 
as his lack of faith, so he did not put the promise to the 
test. Little by little, moreover, he found strength to re- 
nounce worldly pleasures. Chief among these for him 
were dancing and bell-ringing. To give up the latter 
was not an easy task. He first abandoned pulling the 
rope, but continued to stand in the doorway, where he 
might hear the sweet sound of the bells. But after a 
time the fear that these with the tower might fall on 
him for his sins led him to move farther away, and at 
last the conviction that he was trifling caused him to 
depart whoUy. 

Thus the progress continued, with the pilgrim's pas- 



JOHN BUNYAN 119 

sionate yearning for salvation, his chaotic despair and 
ecstasy. At times the evils of his youth haunted him ; 
in his own eyes he was " more loathsome . . . than 
a toad." Once he took much comfort from Luther's 
Commentary on the Galatians. " Now I found, as I 
thought, that I loved Christ dearly. ... I felt love to 
Him hot as fire." But thereupon came a voice saying, 
"Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him." For a time he resisted, 
but one morning as he lay in bed in spiritual torment 
he gave up. " Let Him go if He will," he said. Alas ! 
Now all was truly lost ; the Devil had won ; Judas was 
poor Bunyan's only peer in sinj^ 

The vividness of the man's visions, the terrible reality 
of his torment, — these are the striking things about his 
struggle. It is hard for us, for any age indeed, to under- 
stand how much the outcome mattered to him. He lived 
in a time when men went into battle singing hymns, 
when Cromwell himself wept " hysterical tears," and 
when commanders of the Parliamentary forces bore 
such names as " Captain Hew-Agag-in-pieces-before-the- 
Lord." Nothing in all Puritanism was so vitally impor- 
tant as this struggle of the human soul for salvation, 
this agony so vividly pictured in the life of Bunyan. 

At last, too, he did come, like Christian, to a land 
of spiritual rest. For a while the conflict had broken 
his health, but with new faith and hope, which gained 
slowly upon him, he grew strong again. The texts of 
the Bible now "looked not so grimly as before; " " now 
remained only the hinder part of the tempest." About 
the year 1653 he was publicly baptized in the Ouse, 
by Mr. Gifford, pastor of a congregation in Bedford. 
For a few years he suffered set-backs and periods of 
despair, but by 1655 he had attained a spiritual calm 



120 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and fortitude which never deserted him. In that year 
he moved to a house in Bedford, and was made a dea- 
con of the congregation. From then till his death he 
was unceasing in good works. 

If there is very little known about Bunyan's youth, 
there is not a great deal known about his maturity. 
His own statements about himself are exasperatingly 
few except in spiritual matters. Thus, the name of his 
first wife and the date of their marriage are unknown ; 
the time of the composition of his greatest work is con- 
jecture, and many of the stories of his life in prison 
are mere fiction. His second wife, Elizabeth, who sur- 
vived him, was married probably in 1655, the first 
year of his ministry. It is known that he had six chil- 
dren, all of whom except his blind daughter, Mary, 
outlived him. 

There is, however, plenty of evidence of Bunyan's 
success as a preacher. " Hundreds," it was said, came 
in " to hear the word." Yet his head was not turned. 
" What, thought I," he says, " shall I be proud because 
I am a sounding brass ? Is it so much to be a fiddle ? " 
He did not hold back, however, when he felt sure of 
his true mission ; he had a story to tell, and there were 
thousands eager to hear it. He spoke straight from the 
heart in plain English ; he felt, he says, " as if an angel 
of God had stood at my back." There is a story that 
once a listener remarked what a sweet sermon he had 
delivered, to which Bunyan replied, " Ay, you have no 
need to tell me that, for the devil whispered it to me 
before I was well out of the pulpit." 

Very soon after taking to the ministry, Bunyan be- 
gan to write. In 1656 he published his first volume, 
Some Gospel Truths Opened. He was answered by 



JOHN BUNYAN 121 

a young Quaker, Edward Burrough, and shortly after 
had ready a reply, A Vindication of Gospel Truths 
Opened (1657). From then on tiU his death, except 
for a few years during his imprisonment, he turned 
out controversial books, religious allegories, and exhor- 
tations with the fertility of a Scott or a Defoe. Of 
the long list of writings mainly read the most famous 
are : The Holy City (1665), Grace Abounding to the 
Chief of Sinners (1666), Saved by Grace (1675), 
The Strait Gate (1676), The Pilgrim's Progress, 
Part the First (1678), Life and Death of Mr. Bad- 
man (1680), The Holy War (1682), The Pilgrim's 
Progress, Part the Second (1684). 

But Bunyan had not been long preaching and writing 
before he came into conflict with the law. For soon 
after May, 1660, when the bells were rung for King 
Charles II to " come to his own again," there began a 
zealous prosecution of non-conformist ministers. Men 
were forbidden to call people together for unauthorized 
religious services in private houses or barns. Bunyan 
was taken in the act, and was therefore legally guilty. 
He was not, however, treated with peculiar severity; 
quite the contrary, when it was discovered that his sim- 
ple flock had none of the violent, rebellious purposes 
of Fifth Monarchy men, he was given a chance to escape 
punishment if he would give his word that he would re- 
frain in the future. But when Bunyan replied, " If I 
was let out of prison to-day I would preach the gospel 
again to-morrow by the help of God," his committal to 
prison was, as the law stood, a just sentence. Some of 
his judges, to be sure, especially one Sir John Keeling, 
who was stiU smarting from Puritan ungentleness dur- 
ing the Rebellion, were unnecessarily harsh in manner. 



122 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Keeling received his reward, however, by being sent 
down to fame as Lord Hategood in Pilgrim's Pro- 
gress. 

Bunyan's flock did not give up their pastor without 
a fight. Nothing, however, could be done unless he would 
promise to stop preaching, and this he quietly but firmly 
refused to do. Mr. Cobb, Clerk of the Peace, spent 
much time reasoning with him in jail ; Bunyan thanked 
him for " his civil and meek discoursing," but would 
not change. Soon after, on the King's coronation, when 
prisoners had, according to ancient custom, the per- 
mission to sue for pardon, Bunyan's wife, Elizabeth, 
traveled three times up to London with a petition to 
the House of Lords. But she met with no success, and 
Bunyan therefore remained in prison, except for a short 
release in 1666, during the next twelve years. 

Tradition has ascribed the place of imprisonment to 
the picturesque little jail which used to perch on the 
bridge over the Ouse. Careful investigation, however, 
has proved nearly conclusively that both this imprison- 
ment and the later one, in 1675, were in the Bedford 
county jail. Almost aU prisons at that time were unfit 
for long habitation, but Bedford prison, though the 
weak did " rot " there, as the saying goes, was probably 
not so foul as Bunyan partisans have pictured it. Cer- 
tainly Bunyan was not badly treated, nor did he suffer 
greatly from the physical confinement. He was de- 
pressed, however, by the thought of the separation from 
his work and from his needy family, especially from his 
blind daughter, Mary, of whom he often speaks with 
tender affection. "Oh, the thoughts of the hardships 
my blind one might go under would break my heart to 
pieces ! " 



JOHN BUNYAN 123 

Yet the prisoner was by no means wholly cut off 
from his work. In the first place, he had some liberty 
between the Autumn Assizes of 1661 and the Spring 
Assizes of 1662, and again for a short period in 1666. 
At these times he preached frequently, in the face of 
the law. Besides, in prison he found a little group 
who were ready to take comfort from his teaching. 
Then, too, he had his Bible to read, and, most of all, 
his recent spiritual experiences to think out. He spent 
much time, moreover, in writing, especially at first. 
Of the last six years of his confinement, during which 
he wrote nothing authenticated, very little is known. 
There are some grounds for supposing that he was 
less strictly guarded than before, that he enjoyed in- 
deed occasional liberty and was sometimes allowed to 
preach. 

By the King's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672 
Bunyan was made a free man. On May 9 he was 
granted a license to preach in a barn in Josias 
Eoughead's orchard in Bedford. This in 1707 was 
replaced by a meeting-house, itself followed in 1849 
by the present chapel, one of the chief, though not 
most beautiful, places of Bunyan interest in Bedford. 

Bunyan's second imprisonment has received special 
notice because during it he is supposed to have begun 
Pilgrim^ s Progress. The Declaration of Indulgence 
was withdrawn in 1673, the Test Act, which required 
strict conformity to the Church of England, was passed, 
and the Bedford preacher was therefore again in dan- 
ger. Dr. William Foster, one of his chief accusers in 
1660, procured a warrant with the signatures of thir- 
teen magistrates, dated March 4, 1675, and Bunyan, 
guilty as before, was again imprisoned. But after six 



124 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

months the intervention of Dr. Owen and of Barlow, 
the Bishop of Lincoln, brought Bunyan a release and 
practical security against future imprisonment. His 
great book, not published till 1678, must have been 
begun, it is now generally conceded, in this second 
durance, if in either; for Bunyan usually published 
hot from the pen, and it is unhkely that he should 
have kept the manuscript unprinted for six years. 

Pilgrim^s Progress at first did not find great 
favor among scholars, but it was popular enough to 
go through ten editions during the author's lifetime. 
In the eighteenth century Cowper feared he should be 
laughed at for admiring it, but early in the nineteenth 
century it was recognized by the ablest judges as the 
book which, along with Paradise Lost, stands out as 
the most typical, the most genuine work of Puritan 
England. Men no longer look to it as the one volume 
besides the Bible wherein may be found the only solu- 
tion of their troubles ; but it now holds its place by its 
literary merit, irrespective of its religious value. The 
best evidence of its widespread popularity is the fact 
that it has been translated into over seventy-five lan- 
guages and dialects. 

Towards the end of his life the tinker's celebrity as 
a preacher became very great. Charles Doe, who knew 
him, says that " when Mr. Bunyan preached in London, 
if there were but one day's notice given, there would 
be more people come together than the meeting-house 
could hold. I have seen by my computation, about 
twelve hundred at a morning lecture by seven o'clock 
on a working day, in the dark winter time." When 
Charles II wondered how the great Dr. Owen could 
" sit and listen to an illiterate tinker," Owen answered, 



JOHN BUNYAN 125 

" I would gladly give up all my learning if I could 
preach like that tinker." 

In all this fame, however, Bunyan preserved his hu- 
mility. He refused to be more than a visitor to Lon- 
don, and from his release to his death lived in a simple 
cottage in the parish of St. Cuthbert's, Bedford. A. M. 
Bagford, curious to see the study of so great a man, 
one day visited the tinker. To his surprise he found a 
small room, the contents of which, says Canon Venables, 
one of Bunyan's best biographers, were " hardly larger 
than those of his prison cell. They were limited to a 
Bible, and copies of The Pilgrim's Progress and a 
few other books — chiefly his own works." 

There is little to add to Bunyan's story except the 
incident which hastened his death. He often left Bed- 
ford to preach in neighboring towns, to comfort the 
afflicted, and to settle foolish disputes. In the summer 
of 1688 he rode to Reading for the purpose of mending 
a quarrel between a father and a son. He was success- 
ful, but in the subsequent ride through a driving rain 
to London, where he was to preach the next Sunday, 
caught a severe cold. He managed to preach on the 
Sunday, August 19, but on the following Tuesday he 
fell seriously sick and a few days later, August 31, he 
died. He was buried in Bunhill Fields cemetery. 

In spite of rather meagre facts, the figure of the 
great Puritan preacher stands out very clear. There 
are one or two striking descriptions of him. Charles 
Doe says, " He was tall of stature, strong-boned, though 
not corpulent ; somewhat of a ruddy face, with spark- 
ling eyes, wearing his hair on his upper lip after the 
old British fashion. His hair reddish, but in his later 
days time had sprinkled it with grey. His nose well 



126 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

set, but not declining or bending. His mouth mode- 
rately large, his forehead something high, and his habit 
always plain and modest." A more vigilant, active man, 
one would say, than the well-fed laborer so often de- 
picted on the frontispiece of his books. Canon Ven- 
ables adds the testimony of John Nelson, who knew 
Bunyan in prison : " His countenance was grave and 
sedate, and did so to the life discover the inward frame 
of his heart, that it was convincing to the beholders and 
did strike something of awe into them that had nothing 
of the fear of God." As regards Bunyan's creed, we 
have his own words : " 1 would be, as I hope I am, a 
Christian. But for those factious titles of Anabaptist, 
Independent, Presbyterian, and the like, I conclude that 
they come neither from Jerusalem nor from Antioch, 
but from Hell or from Babylon." 

The one important point of Bunyan's life, after all, 
is his conversion and its results ; above all, the chief 
result. Pilgrims Progress. How he went up into the 
pulpit at a time when people strained by day and by 
night to hear the story of the Bible ; how he, fresh from 
his tinker's trade and speaking the simple, homely Eng- 
lish of the great Book, stirred their hearts ; how true 
to the eager listeners the story of the Carpenter's Son of 
Nazareth sounded from his lips, — of this we to-day get 
only a faint impression. Bunyan the preacher may in- 
deed be forgotten, but Bunyan the author of Pilgrim s 
Progress has taken a permanent place in history. In 
the tinker's book is revealed the best type of Puritan, 
— the man too big to be lost in the unessential disputes 
of sects, the man whose single, absorbing interest was 
the salvation of the soul. Cromwell and Milton were the 
only other Puritans who combined his intensity of re- 



JOHN BUNYAN 127 

ligious zeal with his breadth of mind and power over 
men. The Hves of these three, warrior, poet, and 
preacher, best explain why Puritanism set such an in- 
delible stamp on the English nation. 



JOHN DRYDEN 

John Dryden has been called a lock, by which the 
waters of English poetry were let down from the moun- 
tains of Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope. 
By his admirers and followers he was regarded as the 
man who redeemed our poetry from its wildness and 
barbarism and taught it to be elegant and refined. By 
general consent he is now considered a master of smooth 
and energetic verse, the best satirist and one of the most 
judicious critics in the history of our literature. He was 
among the first to write that easy and vigorous prose 
which was almost unknown in the time of our great 
poetry. More than this, he was a kind of literary dicta- 
tor in his day, though his rule was not without frequent 
dispute ; too often, however, he is found ministering to 
the degraded taste of his contemporaries when he ought 
to have been maintaining the best traditions of a litera- 
ture which he comprehended and valued so well. He 
cannot be absolved from the charge of pandering to the 
vices of the Restoration period. Maturing slowly, for he 
was doing his best work at the end of his life upon the 
verge of threescore and ten, Dryden was just ready for 
his poetic task with the accession of Charles II in 1660. 
At once he became the favored dramatist of the coijrt, 
and the representative poet for these new times. 

What these times were must be briefly recorded by 
way of explanation of the poet's career. To Milton and 
his friends of the lost cause it seemed that the " sons of 
Belial, flown with insolence and wine," were in full con- 



JOHN DRYDEN 129 

trol of the situation. To the restored cavaliers it merely 
seemed that sour rebellion was at last put down, Astrsea 
had returned, and the King was come to his own. Ex- 
treme repression had quite naturally yielded to reckless- 
ness just as extreme. Where in Puritan times men were 
constrained to assume a virtue they did not begin to 
feel, and where many a man went about as a kind of com- 
pulsory Roundhead, so here in the reaction against that 
excess of piety Englishmen exaggerated their own pro- 
fession of license and even vice, and many a man was 
constrained to pretend the immorality which at heart he 
really loathed. Hypocrisy now became the cardinal sin, 
and to be self-contained, orderly, and moral seemed to 
the world clear evidence of double dealing. Hence a 
general spirit of indulgence and freedom from moral 
restraint, with the Merry Monarch setting a brave exam- 
ple to his people. 

To the call of this new spirit in English life Dryden 
responded only too well. Vigorous, earnest, and, while 
no Puritan, a naturally clean-minded man, he neverthe- 
less produced comedies so indecent that even the bound- 
less license of his public was overstepped. And after its 
third night the worst of them had to be called in, con- 
demned for grossness which even now, considerably re- 
duced in print, offends the most indulgent reader. Yet 
this is not the only instance when Dryden seems to float 
passive upon the current of his time ; nor was immor- 
ality the only method by which he did violence to his 
literary conscience. He had, for his generation, a pro- 
found knowledge of older English literature, and rever- 
ence for its best traditions. He was, moreover, among 
the fit audience, though few, who understood the great- 
ness of Paradise Lost. " This man," he is reported 



130 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

to have said, " cuts us out, and the ancients too ; " and 
tradition has it that he went to Milton and asked leave 
to put Paradise Lost into rhyme. Whatever was 
Milton's reply, it is certain that Dryden carried out 
his purpose and published in 1669 the State of Inno- 
cence^ an opera based on the epic. Here, however, is the 
contradiction in point. Dryden regards Milton's poem 
as " one of the greatest, most noble, and sublime ; " yet 
he makes an opera of it, and turns the blank verse, 
which is its chief glory, into rhyme. So with his plays. 
English traditions required tragedy to be written in 
blank verse ; but King and court were for the French 
models, and Dryden wrote his tragedies, after French 
precedent, in rhymed couplets. One tragedy indeed, 
All for Love^ he composed in blank verse, the only 
one, it is said, which he wrote to please himself. It is 
in these contradictions, this knowing of the better and 
following of the worse, that the character of Dryden 
must be explained. But neither contradiction nor du- 
plicity will serve as the explanation itself. It is true 
that he preferred the old English masters to the new 
French models, and recognized the greatness of Milton ; 
but it is also true that he saw the need for regularity, 
constraint, and elegance in English letters. It is true 
that in his heart he despised the immorality that he 
forced into his plays ; but it is also true that, like 
Fielding after him, he believed in the spirited, hearty, 
and open life, and hated whatever smacked of the hypo- 
crite. Part of his revolt against the Puritans, then, and 
part of his critical and literary reform were genuine ; 
to a great degree he must be regarded as an honest 
representative of his time. 

John Dryden was born in August, 1631, at Aid winkle 



JOHN DRYDEN 131 

All Saints, in Northamptonshire, to that happy condi- 
tion which passes in England under the name of coun- 
try gentleman. His grandfather was a baronet, Sir 
Erasmus Dryden, whose third son, bearing the same 
name, married Mary, daughter of the Rev. Henry 
Pickering. It is interesting to note that on both sides 
the ancestors of this royalist poet had espoused the 
Puritan cause. Indeed, Dryden's own heroic stanzas on 
the death of Oliver Cromwell, September, 1658, are 
thoroughly Puritan in their tone. We know little about 
his boyhood, although the tradition remains that he was 
always very fond of fishing. He had a scholarship at 
Westminster School in London, under the famous head- 
master Dr. Busby ; and again secured a scholarship at 
Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1650, 
at the age of nineteen, another proof of the slowness 
with which Dryden's mind matured. He took his bach- 
elor's degree in January, 1654, and must have employed 
his time in serious and extended studies. However that 
may be, he got no fellowship, and probably felt no call 
to the academic profession. In the same year he inher- 
ited a small landed estate from his father, but his tastes 
were not for country life, and his permanent residence 
was in London. He wrote, as we have seen, a eulogy 
upon Cromwell, but greeted the Restoration of Charles 
with two poems of almost fulsome praise. Still, it is 
fair to say that his heart was in this poem of welcome, 
and praise in those times had to be fulsome if it was 
to count for praise at all. In 1663 Dryden married 
Lady Elizabeth, sister of his friend Sir Robert How- 
ard and daughter of the Earl of Berkshire. It was 
by no means an ideal marriage. The wife was neither 
beautiful nor intelligent, and her conduct may not have 



132 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

been all that was desired. Dryden was hardly a model 
husband. Yet there is good evidence that they were 
fond of their children. He sent his two older boys to 
Westminster School, under the same Busby whose flog- 
gings were so renowned and had quickened the some- 
what sluggish temperament of the poet. If we are to 
take seriously the various allusions to matrimony scat- 
tered through Dryden's works, we may well agree with 
Sir Walter Scott that they speak " an inward conscious- 
ness of domestic misery ;" but marriage, always a target 
for wit, was never more so, or with better reason, than 
under Charles the Second. Certain it is that Dryden's 
marriage brought him no solid advantages of prefer- 
ment ; and the liberal income which he earned during 
the next succeeding years was due to his efforts as a 
playwright and as the favored dramatist of the court. 

With the restoration of Charles English drama came 
out of its long seclusion, due to the closing of the thea- 
tres by Puritan command. Dryden's first play, The 
Wild Gallant, 1663, was unsuccessful ; but The Rival 
Ladies was well received. He helped his brother- 
in-law Howard in The Indian Queen and wrote his 
own Indian Emperor for successful performance in 
1665. Dryden was now one of the recognized leaders 
among literary men in London, and was a conspicuous 
figure at those coffee-houses which served as a kind of 
literary exchange. Typically English in the slow but 
persistent maturing of liis powers, he now showed in 
his Annus Mirabilis a sureness and vigor in poetic 
composition best noted in his vivid description of the 
great London Fire. This poem, appearing in 1667 and 
frequently reprinted, contains an account of the memo- 
rable events of the preceding year. It is Dryden's first 



JOHN DRYDEN 133 

long poem, and was his last, until, thirteen years later, 
he turned from drama to satire. Scattered throusfh his 
plays, however, are many songs and lyrics, some of great 
charm, which have been too often neglected by the 
critic. About the same time as the Annus Mirahilis 
he wrote his prose Essay on Dramatic Poesy ^ defend- 
ing his use of rhyme in tragic plays. Meanwhile his 
dramatic work went on triumphantly. He made a con- 
tract with the King's Theatre to write them three plays 
a year ; and while this undertaking was not strictly 
carried out, his profits from the arrangement were con- 
sistently large. In 1670 he was made Poet Laureate, 
and also Historiographer ; and we are told that for his 
work in both capacities he had " a salary of two hun- 
dred pounds a year, and a butt of Canary Wine." Of 
his various plays little is to be said except that they 
followed with painfid obsequiousness what their author 
took to be the popular demand. They deserve no no- 
tice apart from those "heroic tragedies " in which the 
famous Nell Gwyn took a conspicuous part, and from 
that play which he wrote to please himself and in imi- 
tation of Shakespeare, All for Love^ or The World 
Well Lost. This was in 1678 ; its success was instant; 
the author's profits were considerable ; and with his 
more national conception of dramatic poetry it seemed 
as if Dryden was destined for greater honors in this 
field. Fortunately for him and for English literature, his 
dramatic career was rudely interrupted, and his long 
course of prosperity came to an abrupt end. Drawn into 
a quarrel between the Earl of Rochester, witty, profli- 
gate, and cowardly, and Lord Mulgrave, Dryden was 
assaulted, December 18, 1679, by ruffians in Rochester's 
pay ; that night he was " severely beaten as he passed 



134 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

through Rose Street, Covent Garden, returning from 
Will's Coffee-House to his own house in Gerard Street." 
Eight years earlier Dryden had been wittily ridiculed 
under the name of Bayes, in the Rehearsal. In 1673 
his enemies had set up as his rival in poetry and drama 
an absolutely worthless rhymester named Elkanah Set- 
tle. Finally it was hinted that the poet was concerned in 
certain satires directed against the King. These hints, 
however, came to nothing when Dryden published, in 
1681, his great political satire, ^6saZom and Achitophel. 
This is a conspicuous point in the career of Dryden. 
When most men look back, he was beginning to look 
forward, and was finding his real vocation as a poet. 
He was now fifty years of age; his varied dramatic ex- 
periments inverse, always vigorous but uneven and often 
deficient in elegance, were now exchanged for that po- 
litical and personal satire in which his ripe experience 
of life, his keen observation, his remorseless wit, and his 
inexhaustible energy of phrase made him master of the 
field. Nor did the public fail to respond. Large editions 
of Absalom and Achitophel vi ere. sold ; it struck the very 
bull's eye of popular agitation. The Earl of Shaftesbury, 
with a considerable following, was in opposition to the 
King, and he was pressing the claims of the Duke of 
Monmouth against the unpopular and " papistical" 
Duke of York, heir to the throne. Shaftesbury was 
committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason, 
and it was in the exciting days between the imprison- 
ment and the decision of the Grand Jury that Dryden's 
poem appeared. Although the Biblical story had been 
used before, with Monmouth as Absalom and Shaftes- 
bury as Achitophel, the genius of Dryden, particularly 
the consummate skill with which he characterized the 



JOHN DRYDEN 135 

leaders of the faction, rendered ridiculous all charges 
of plagiarism. Among the memorable personal sketches 
are those of Shaftesbury himself, whose crime as traitor 
was thrown, in the second edition of the poem, into even 
sharper relief by the praise of his purity as a judge ; of 
Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham, satirized 
under the name of Zimri, — 

" Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, 
Was everything by starts and nothing long, 
But in the course of one revolving moon 
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; " 

and also of certain friends of the King, such as Ormond, 
Mulgrave, and Halifax. Shaftesbury, however, was set 
free ; the Grand Jury refused to find a bill of high 
treason against him, and a medal was struck by his 
friends in honor of the event. By command of the King, 
who appreciated Dryden's merits, the poet published, in 
March, 1682, another poem called The Medal, a Satire 
against Sedition. In October of the same year appeared 
MacFleclcnoe, said to have been the model of Pope's 
Dunciad, a literary satire directed against a poet of 
the opposite faction named ShadweU. Many who know 
neither this poem nor its occasion can quote the lines 
where " ShadweH never deviates into sense ; " it is a 
masterpiece of its kind, and the author is credited with 
thinking it the best of his poems. A continuation of 
Absalom and Achitophel, published in the autumn of 
this same busy year, 1682, is only in part the work 
of Dryden ; the bulk of it is by Nahum Tate. 

Risen to renown and literary sovereignty, Dryden had 
suffered a corresponding fall in his fortunes. Cut off 
from the regular profits of a playwright in public favor, 
he depended on the good offices of the court and on his 



136 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

earnings as a writer of translations, dedications, and the 
prologue or epilogue of another man's play. So great 
was his authority that his words of commendation in this 
latter form were eagerly sought by the dramatists who 
put new pieces upon the boards, and Dr. Johnson tells 
how he " raised his price " from two guineas to three. 
In addition to his salary as laureate, the King had given 
him a pension of one hundred pounds ; payments, how- 
ever, were often uncertain, and the poet fell frequently 
into pecuniary distress. He had a family to support 
and sons to educate. It is clear that he looked to 
the court for constant assistance, and that the court 
looked to him for the powerful aid of his pen. For the one 
case may be noted his appointment as collector of cus- 
toms late in 1683 ; for the other his attitude towards 
the religion secretly acknowledged by Charles and 
openly professed by James. With the accession of the 
latter, Dryden changed his faith. In the Layman's 
Creed, Religio Laid, he had not long before de- 
fended the Church of England ; now he was impelled 
to defend his new belief as well as to aid the unpopular 
cause of the King. He entered into prose controversy 
with some of the ablest writers on the side of the na- 
tional Church, and in an allegorical poem. The Hind 
and the Panther, in which the various sects are repre- 
sented by animals (the Quaker, for instance, by the 
hare), he makes a vigorous plea for the traditions of 
Rome. In this change of faith, far more than in his 
earlier political change, Dryden laid himself open to 
the charge of time-serving and insincerity. With almost 
any other man this charge would be strictly true, but 
Dryden's temperament, a strange mixture of energy and 
good sense with personal shyness and a kind of mental 



JOHN DRYDEN 137 

timidity, goes far to explain his act. Moreover, in his 
own eyes the change of attitude from that strong de- 
sire, which he shows in his Religio Laici^ for settled 
and final authority in religious affairs, to his recogni- 
tion of papal supremacy in The Hind and the Pan- 
ther^ was not such a momentous step. It is said that 
after his conversion, as before, he cordially disliked 
the priests. Finally, he had at least the courage of his 
second convictions. The Revolution of 1688, which se- 
cured Protestantism in England and stripped Dry den 
of all his official income, failed to influence his new faith 
and made the last twelve years of his life a period in 
which his character appears at its best. 

Cut off from all hope of assistance from the court, 
Dryden now labored sturdily and well as the leading 
man of letters in England. He undertook every kind 
of literary work. He wrote plays, and succeeded both 
in tragedy and in comedy, but came to wreck with his 
last play in 1694. In 1698, two years before his death, 
Dryden had to endure a not undeserved drubbing from 
the cudgel of Jeremy Collier, who attacked " the im- 
morality and profaneness of the Enghsh stage." In 
the preface to his Fables, one of his most attractive 
writings, Dryden, with great simplicity and manliness, 
acknowledged that in the main the parson's attack was 
just. He had written no plays after the failure of his 
Love Triumjihant, and in a poem addressed to the ris- 
ing dramatist Congreve he commits the care of the drama 
to his junior, and adds in pathetic conclusion : — 

" Already I am worn with cares and age, 
And just abandoning the nngrateful stage, 
Unprofitably kept at Heaven's expense, 
I live a rent-charge on His providence. 



138 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

But you, whom every Muse and grace adorn, 
Whom I foresee to better fortune born, 
Be kind to my remains ; and oh, defend, 
Against your judgment, your departed friend ! 
Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue, 
But shade those laurels which descend to you ; 
And take for tribute, what these lines express ; 
You merit more, nor could my love do less." 

Yet he worked on. Age, poverty, disease, and cares 
could not daunt his sturdy heart or stay his hands. 
His last work was his best ; and almost on the thresh- 
old of death he could make his famous assertion that 
thoughts crowded in so fast upon him that his only 
difficulty was " to choose or to reject, to run them into 
verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." 
He translated Juvenal and Persius, and published by 
subscription his famous translation of Virgil, gaining, 
it is said, some twelve hundred pounds by the perform- 
ance. He made versions of stories from Ovid, from 
Chaucer, and from Boccaccio. He wrote for the sec- 
ond time an ode for St. Cecilia's Day, 1697, com- 
monly known as Alexander's Feasts one of the most 
musical and spirited English odes. These latter years, 
moreover, form the period about which are gathered 
the anecdotes" and traditions of Dryden as the dictator 
of English letters. To his many friends and disciples 
he was the arbiter of their poetic destiny. For his use 
there was a chair by the fire in winter and by the win- 
dow in summer, at Will's Coffee-House ; and hither 
flocked the younger men of letters, who found in the 
offer of a pinch of snuff from his box the assurance 
of literary success. Not all were thus favored, though 
it is to be hoped that Swift's contempt for Dryden 
is not to be explained by his kinsman's remark upon 



JOHN DRYDEN , 139 

verses submitted for his approval, " Cousin Swift, you 
will never be a poet." In the spring of 1700 he had 
a fatal attack of gout, and died on the first of May 
at his London home, and was buried in Westminster 
Abbey. 

The personal appearance of Dryden was far from 
striking ; his face was fat and without particular ex- 
pression. He is said to have borne the nickname of 
" Poet Squat." His character seems to have been gen- 
erous and confiding ; nor should his biting satire lead 
us to think of him as what is called a " good hater " 
in actual life. As a poet he is the herald and in many 
respects the hero of the Augustan age, surpassing his 
great scholar Pope in energy and originality, but sur- 
passed by Pope in a certain urbanity and finish. Un- 
like Pope, he leaves the impression of sturdiness, man- 
liness, sincerity, — qualities which seem, it is true, to 
be contradicted by the shifts, evasions, flatteries, and 
inconsistencies of his life, but which, nevertheless, per- 
sist in the reader's mind as somehow essential to the 
character of "glorious old John." 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Dryden bridges the space between the Puritans and 
the eighteenth century. The period from his death, 1700, 
to the publication of the " Lyrical Ballads," 1798, is 
sometimes divided into the Age of Pope and the Age 
of Johnson, but the same general literary tradition held 
throughout the century, and the whole time may there- 
fore, for want of an exact and comprehensive term, fitly 
be called The Eighteenth Century. Its great character- 
istic was its sane, unimaginative reasoning, and its great 
contribution was its development of English prose. 

The chief interests of men during this century, more 
particularly during the first part, were in the city. All 
important English life centred around London. News- 
papers were started,^ and great advances in conunercial 
prosperity were made. Yet this life was for the most 
part a very superficial, frivolous one, and the card- 
table, the sedan-chair, the patch and the periwig, the 
coffee-house and the levee figure largely in the interests 
of the day. Following a model of etiquette and elegance, 
but not of profound thought, men, generally speaking, 
ceased to think greatly for themselves. No burning ques- 
tions of " God, immortality, freedom" consumed them. 
If they looked within, they found reflected there only 
the shallowness of the life about them. Each one thought 
his first duty was to cut an elegant figure in this world ; 
a display of violent emotion or fresh ingenuousness was 

^ There had been newspapers a few years before the turn of the cen- 
tury, but their real development belongs to the time of Queen Anne. 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 141 

a sign of a lack of polish. There was, to be sure, 
beneath this superficial refinement, something of the 
coarseness and rudeness of Restoration England. To a 
Frenchman the Englishman of Queen Anne's day was 
still largely a boor, beaf -eating, hard-drinking, profane, 
violent. Nor was London a model of cleanliness and 
well-ordered beauty. Though there had been vast im- 
provements since the great fire, most of the streets were 
crooked and without light by night ; the sewage was 
discharged down a gutter in the middle of the street ; 
there were no sidewalks, and the posts which protected 
the pedestrian from being knocked down did not shelter 
him from a shower of mud on a wet day. At night the 
smgle wayfarer ran a good chance of being beaten and 
robbed by city highwaymen or by a band of disorderly 
youths who dubbed themselves Mohawks. In no other 
age, nevertheless, has restraint and formality so got 
the better of the English nation. There was, in spite of 
much fundamental rudeness, an unmistakable grace and 
urbanity about the city gentlemen of two hundred years 
ago. 

As men followed rules and correctness in social 
matters, as they too often considered form of greater 
importance than substance, so in their literature they 
tended towards lifeless conformity. Dryden, as has been 
seen, gave to literature the new direction, after the 
French model, along the lines of correctness and polish 
at the expense of naturalness. But what in Dryden wa^ 
only tendency became, in the writers of the eighteenth 
century, a confirmed habit, and mere skill and deftness 
passed frequently for poetic genius. Poetry was made, 
to a great extent, after a geometrical pattern — like the 
trim gardens at Versailles. Only one poet, in fact, was 



142 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

conspicuously great. He, however, exercised a sway over 
English verse which rivaled the influence of Chaucer. 
In his hands the heroic couplet reached perfection, and 
for fifty years after him it was the chief form of poetic 
expression. The Queen Anne Age. however, was dis- 
tinctly an age of prose and reason. In the essai/ lies its 
special fame. In fact, prose, tentative until Dryden, first 
began to hold its own with poetry imder Addison and 
S\\'ift. And satire, it must not be forgotten, whether in 
verse or prose, was by far most successfully handled 
in the early eighteenth century. 

In the second half of the century, under the Georges, 
life became again more openly vulgar ; the veneer of 
delicacy was worn thin. Literature, however, with the 
exception that it lost some of its terseness and sparkle, 
carried on the tradition set by Addison and Pope. The 
chief interest, of course, centres around Dr. Johnson, 
with whose name are grouped those of such powerful 
writers as Goldsmith, Gibbon, and Burke ; but the real 
contribution of the second half of the century was the 
novel, which had never reached any considerable ma- 
turity before the work of Kichardson and Fielding. 

This century, more particularly the earlier part, has 
often been called •• The Augustan Age," because of it^ 
almost pathetic attempt to copy the " Golden Age "' of 
Virgil and Horace. On account of such imitative work 
the epithet "pseudo-classic" has been not inappropri- 
ately applied to the literature of the day. Yet it must 
not be forgotten that it had a worth of its own, bor- 
rowed from no other people or time ; the prose of the 
century stands on its own merits. 



DANIEL DEFOE 

The life of Defoe is full of contradictions. In the 
first place, nothing could have been more characteristic 
of the Augustan Age in which he lived than his politi- 
cal pamphleteering and clever satire. Yet nothing could 
have been more un- Augustan than his carelessness of 
form and his great versatility. Again, he was in most 
of his writings a moralist, sometimes obtrusively so. 
Yet no writer of distinction has ever descended to 
greater trickery. Furthermore, he made a business of 
politics and succeeded in spite of many difficult, un- 
expected situations. Yet in all his business pursuits 
he was a theorizer and sooner or later a financial fail- 
ure. 

Defoe's fame to-day rests, of course, on his great 
novel, Robinson Crusoe ; but novel-writing was only 
one side of a very active life. He conducted magazines 
and wrote for them, he made poetry, composed trea- 
tises, and all through his life poured out a large stream 
of political pamphlets. Added to this, he was very 
closely involved in politics for twenty years, and he 
tried his hand at many forms of business. He had the 
versatility of an Elizabethan, but none of the splendor. 
He was a kind of squalid, calculating Ralegh in an age 
when large designs and noble deeds were rare. Defoe's 
duplicity, however, is not always easy to detect ; indeed 
one often feels he did not always detect himself." He 
soon learned, without reliable friends and with a half- 



144 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

unconscious selfishness, to manage cleverly for himself ; 
as Mr. Minto has put it, he was a man of " incompara- 
ble plausibility." 

Very little is known of Defoe's earlier years. He 
was born in 1661, in the parish of St. Giles, Cripple- 
gate. His father, James Foe, was a butcher. The son 
was sent to Mr. Morton's Academy in Newington Green, 
with the intention that he should prepare for the dis- 
senting ministry. How much learning he got there is 
altogether conjectural, for the thousand and one bits 
of knowledge which he later so ingeniously turned to 
account might have been picked up anywhere by so 
active a mind. University men taunted him with igno- 
rance, and Swift referred to him as " an illiterate fellow, 
whose name I forget." In 1705 he challenged John 
Tutchin " to translate with him any Latin, French, or 
Italian author, and after that to retranslate them 
crosswise for twenty pounds each book." That Tutchin 
declined the challenge is not so significant of Defoe's 
scholarship as of Defoe's readiness to meet an issue. Some 
years later he cleverly defended his learning in Apple- 
bee's Journal. " For, said /, here 's a man speaks five 
Languages and reads the Sixth, is a master of Astro- 
nomy, Geography, History, and abundance of other use- 
ful Knowledge (which I do not mention, that you may 
not guess at the Man, who is too modest to desire it), 
and yet, they say this Man is no Scholar." 

After five years at Newington, the young Dissenter 
left the academy without entering the ministry. He 
followed for a while the trade of hosier — evidently as 
a kind of middle-man — and acted as a commission 
merchant in other matters, some of which probably took 
him to Spain. About 1692 he failed completely and took 



DANIEL DEFOE 145 

refuge in Bristol. There he was known as the " Sunday 
Gentleman," on account of his appearing only on the 
day when there was no fear of arrest. He managed 
somehow to appease his creditors, though he did not 
clear himself wholly of debt. Soon after, he started a 
pantile factory at Tilbury, in Essex, but that, too, 
brought him heavy debt. 

Before his business catastrophe Defoe had already 
begun a political career. In spite of his assertion to the 
contrary, he probably began to write pamphlets as early 
as 1683. He is known to have taken part in the Duke 
of Monmouth's rebellion in 1685 ; and soon after 1688 
he is found currying favor with WiUiam of Orange. 
Although he afterwards declared that he had been the 
King's intimate adviser, it is probable that WiUiam 
knew little of him until just before the accession of 
Anne. Defoe wrote numerous pamphlets in favor of 
the King, the first of which, in 1691, a verse pamphlet 
entitled A New Discovery of an Old Intrigue, a 
Satire levelled at Treachery and Ambition, is the first 
publication certainly his. As a result of his services, 
Defoe was appointed, " without the least application " 
on his part. Accountant to the Commissioners of the 
Glass Duty. This position he held from 1694 to 1699. 
Throughout William's reign he showed great loyalty 
to the King, — a more consistent loyalty than he ever 
showed before or after, — and defended the royal cause 
with a vigorous pen. His crowning work of this kind*- 
was the True-horn Englishman, 1701, a poem which 
pointed out that William had as good a right to the 
throne as any " heterogeneous Englishman." 

Besides his business and politics, Defoe found time 
for other work. In 1697 he published his Essay on 



146 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Projects^ a long work in which banks, highways, 
friendly societies, a pension-office, wagering, fools, 
bankrupts, academies, seamen, and other matters are 
discussed with mathematical accuracy. About this time, 
too, he changed his name from " Foe " to " Defoe." 

In 1702 came out his Shortest Way with the Dis- 
senters, a pamphlet aimed at the " High Fliers," or 
Tories and High Churchmen. The satire, however, 
was so blunt that the Dissenters themselves misunder- 
stood it; they took Defoe's conclusion, "Now let us 
crucify the thieves ! " in dead earnest. And the worst 
of it was that the government party, the " High Fliers," 
understood and resented. In February, 1703, Defoe was 
found guilty of seditious libel, fined 200 marks, sen- 
tenced to stand three times in the pillory, to be impris- 
oned during the Queen's pleasure, and was bound over 
to keep the peace for seven years. 

Before his trial Defoe went into hiding, and it was 
then that the only authentic description of him ap- 
peared. The Gazette, in advertising a reward for his 
capture, described him as " a middle-aged, spare man, 
about forty years old, of a brown complexion, and dark- 
brown coloured hair, but wears a wig ; a hooked nose, 
a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his 
mouth." 

The author of the True-horn Englishman, however, 
was greeted with acclamation in the pillory, with flow- 
ers instead of offal. Pope's line in the Dunciad, — 

" Earless on high stood unabashed Defoe," 

is wholly false. His ears were not clipped and he had 
done nothing of which to be ashamed. He was clever 
enough, moreover, to turn the incident to account. His 



DANIEL DEFOE 147 

Hymn to the Pillory was scattered broadcast about 

London. 

" Hail hieroglyphic state machine, 
Contrived to punish fancy in," 

it began, and it closed with the lines, — 

" Tell them the men that placed him here 
Are friends unto the times; 
But at a loss to find his guilt, 

They can't commit his crimes." 

After one day Defoe's enemies saw that he was making 
popularity in the pillory faster than he ever made tiles 
at Tilbury, so they quickly removed him to prison. 

Defoe was in prison just above a year. It was at 
this time that he started his Review of the Affairs 
of France, which he kept up, writing most of it with 
his own hand, until 1713. While in prison, too, he 
wrote his History of the Great Storm, which he de- 
scribed with the minuteness of an eyewitness, though 
of course he did not see it. In the summer of 1704 
Harley, Lord Oxford, who had recognized Defoe's 
power as a pamphleteer, secured his release, and Defoe 
the Whig thus became, with remarkably easy grace, 
the friend of a Tory government. He was sent at this 
time on some sort of mission to Scotland, probably 
to find out the strength of the Pretender and his party 
there. He asserted that he went as a private gentle- 
man, sometimes out of personal interest, sometimes (so 
far did he descend) to flee his creditors, but there is 
little doubt that the government was backing him. In 
the Review Defoe appeared as the apostle of peace 
and advocated, in a series of brilliant articles, the 
union of Scotland and England. 



148 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

By 1708, however, the Whigs were again in power. 
Harley realized that Defoe's success depended on govern- 
ment favor and generously gave the pamphleteer per- 
mission to seek work from Godolphin and the Whigs. 
Defoe did not hesitate ; he had ever been a Whig at 
heart, he asserted. 

A more difficult manoeuATe was necessary in 1710. 
Dr. Sacheverell, a "High Flier," whose "bloody flag " 
had inspired the Shortest Way with the Dissenters^ , 
was now brought to trial by Godolphin for his seditious, 
High-Church sermons. At first Defoe counseled mod- 
eration. " You should use him," he said, " as we do a 
hot horse. When he first frets and pulls, keep a stiff 
rein and hold him in if you can; but if he grows mad 
and furious, slack your hand, clap your heels to him, 
and let him go. Give him his belly full of it. Away 
goes the beast like a fury over hedge and ditch, till he 
runs himself off his mettle ; perhaps bogs himself, and 
then he grows quiet of course." But Defoe coxild not 
hold back the indignant Whigs. As he had foreseen, 
Sacheverell's sentence turned popular opinion against 
the government, — it raised all the dogs of the parish, 
as he put it. Immediately further fault was found with 
the Whig policy ; very suddenly not one but all of 
them were dismissed ; and the Tories came in for their 
most successful period of government. 

Defoe's position was difficult. He had often called 
himself a Whig ; he had supported the Whig cause for 
two years ; he was an enemy of the Tory, Sacheverell. 
To change colors now would seem impossible. Yet he 
did manage with his usual shrewdness to slip out on 
the winning side. " One hardly knows which to admire 
most," comments Mr. Minto, " the loyalty with which 



DANIEL DEFOE 149 

he stuck to the falling house till the moment of its col- 
lapse, or the adroitness with which he escaped from the 
ruins." He now maintained that his duty was to the 
Queen, irrespective of party prejudice, that her policy 
was at bottom a Whig policy, and that he could there- 
fore easily subscribe to the new government. 

But the Whigs, who knew that Queen Anne's policy 
was what certain intimate advisers wished and that De- 
foe's policy was what he himself wished, did not alto- 
gether believe his protestations that he had not really 
deserted them. They therefore brought him to trial for 
libels against the House of Hanover, but he managed to 
secure a pardon from the Queen. On the accession of 
George I, in 1714, however, the Whigs came definitely 
into power, and in 1715 brought new charges of libelous 
writings against him. This time he was found guilty, 
but he got the sentence deferred, and the wily politician 
finally made peace with the Whig government. This 
was his last change of party. He had steered a rather 
uncertain and hazardous course since his first service 
under the Whigs of William III. He was more of a 
Whig than a Tory — though he was not so much so as 
he liked to believe. The only man to whom he was genu- 
inely loyal was William. 

Defoe's pen was by no means idle during these ac- 
tive years. Besides the Review and a swarm of pam- 
phlets, he wrote in 1706 his famous little Apparition 
of Mrs. Veal. In 1709 came his History of the Union 
(of Scotland and England) ; in 1713 he started, as a 
successor to the Review, the Mercator, which ran for 
one year; in 1714-15 he wrote The Secret History/ 
of One Year (the year after William's accession), An 
Appealto Honour and Justice, The Family Instructor^ 



150 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and A History, by a Scots Gentleman, in the Swedish 
Service, of the Wars of Charles XII. This list does 
not include, moreover, numerous pamphlets, many of 
which were certainly from his pen. 

Defoe's magazine activities did not cease, as was once 
supposed, with the death of the Mercator, in 1714. 
He used his pen actively in political writings until, 
about 1730, old age, gout, and apoplexy forced him 
to give in. His most important work of this kind 
was with a Jacobite paper, Mist's Journal. The dis- 
covery of certain papers by Mr. William Lee in 1864 
has revealed the until then well-guarded secret. The 
government, it seems, was looking about for a man 
who, apparently aiding Mist, should in reality check 
him. Defoe, who had already been suspected of Jaco- 
bite conspiracies in Ireland, was just the man ; for the 
government, knowing the secret, could run no danger, 
and Mist, believing in Defoe's sympathy and rejoicing 
in a friend not altogether the enemy of the govern- 
ment, readily accepted his cooperation. " The Weekly 
Journal and Dormer s Letter, as also The Mercu- 
rius Politicus,^'' Defoe reported to the government, 
"... win be always kept (mistakes excepted) to pass 
as Tory papers, and yet be disabled and enervated, so 
as to do no mischief or give any offence." For eight 
years he kept up the deception and reported to his 
employers. Finally Mist discovered the secret and at- 
tempted to murder Defoe, much to that gentleman's 
astonishment at such ingratitude ! The Mercurius Po- 
liticus ran for four years (1716-1720), and Dormer's 
iVews-Xe^j(ey for two (1716-1718). Defoe also wrote 
for many other periodicals, chief among them Apple- 
bee's Journal, during the years 1720-1726. 



DANIEL DEFOE 151 

The climax of Defoe's literary work, however, was in 
the novel. He was about sixty years old when Itoh- 
inson Crusoe was written, and he had not written 
much fiction as such until then. He had had, never- 
theless, abundant practice in the use of effective de- 
tails ; he had learned, in the journalistic sense, to make 
a good " story," so that novel-writing was really not a 
new step for him. As early as 1706, in the Appari- 
tion of Mrs. Veal, he had shown himself able to write 
excellent fiction. The first part of Robinson Crusoe 
appeared in 1719, the second and third parts in 1720. 
Defoe asserted that the story, really based on the adven- 
tures of Alexander Selkirk, was written as early as 
1708 from his own experiences, thus cleverly putting 
the date just one year ahead of Selkirk's appearance 
in London. The significant thing is that the tale is so 
real that the author might as well have been Selkirk 
himself. That was Defoe's greatest art ; by it only did 
he play so successfully the various games, political and 
literary, which he attempted. 

During the years 1720 and 1722 Defoe turned his 
hand to the writing of fiction with an energy since 
equaled only by Scott. In 1720 appeared Captain 
Singleton, Duncan Campbell, and Memoirs of a 
Cavalier. In 1722 were brought out Moll Flan- 
ders, Colonel Jack, and the Journal of the Plague 
Year, as credible as if Defoe had actually undergone 
the experiences he describes. Roxana, of the same 
type as Moll Flanders, was written in 1724. Defoe 
was indefatigable. The Tour through the Whole 
Island of Great Britain belongs to 1724-26 ; the 
Complete English Tradesman to 1125—21 ; Every- 
hodys Business is JVobody^s Business to 1725; the 



152 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

History of the Devil to 1726; and Captain Carleton 
(possibly not his) to 1728. 

This ceaseless publication, together with salary from 
the government, put him for a time in considerable 
comfort. He built a large house at Stoke Newington, 
kept a coach, continued his schemes of business, and 
worked several plantations. Towards the end, however, 
financial ruin again beset him. His last years are 
clouded in strange obscurity. Mist seems to have kept 
his creditors busy. At all events, the old man went 
into hiding in September, 1729. From his hiding- 
place he addressed in 1730 a pathetic, querulous appeal 
to a rather shrewd and unsympathetic son-in-law, Baker. 
The only redeeming feature of these last years, in fact, 
is his eagerness to provide for his family. He died 
finally on the 26th of April, 1731, in Ropemaker's Alley, 
Moorfields, then a more respectable quarter than now. 

Pausing to contemplate the life of Defoe ' one is filled 
with various emotions, — pity for his infirmities, dis- 
gust at his trickery, and complete wonder at his vitality 
and versatility. Perhaps one of the most striking things 
about him is his loneliness, his lack of friends. The gay 
wits and great writers of Queen Anne's day knew one 
another ; they gathered often at the coffee-houses, for 
both jest and quarrel. Even spiteful Mr. Pope was 
there, and the calm Mr. Addison. But the face of the 
" Sunday Gentleman " never looked in on their gath- 
erings. He never jested with them, never even quar- 
reled frankly and openly in society. In closing his 
account of him Mr. Minto says, " Sometimes pure 
knave seems to be uppermost, sometimes pure patriot ; 
but the mixture is so complex, and the energy of the 
man so restless, that it almost passes human skill to 



DANIEL DEFOE 153 

unravel the two elements." Yet, whatever, good or 
bad, may be said of Defoe's life, posterity will never 
forget the author of Robinson Crusoe. Mankind will 
always be interested in the man who wrote a book 
which has taken so strong a hold on two centuries of 
readers. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 

Jonathan Swift, tlie great Dean of St. Patrick's, 
the famous author of Gulliver, the fiercest satirist of 
English literature, stands alone in the age of Queen 
Anne. Addison had his little coterie. Pope had his 
bright circle of wits, Steele was the cheerful friend of 
all ; Congreve, Gay, and Prior may be thought of in 
their groups. True, Swift had many friends, notably 
Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, but, in the deeper sense, he was 
a solitary figure, — solitary by the sad circumstances of 
his life and by the might of his intellect. Even when 
dictator of London letters and politics, the centre of all 
eyes, he was alone. He needed friends, needed them 
bitterly. Yet no one could completely satisfy his de- 
mand ; had one given all. Swift would have asked more. 
And so, when Stella, the one for whom he cared more 
than for any other, was gone out of his life, his strong 
intellect turned savagely on itself and broke him on his 
own wheel. Once his had been the keenest intellect in 
the whole kingdom, but towards the end, as his mind 
weakened, he grew violent. Unlike his polished con- 
temporaries, he strove earnestly to speak " the plain 
truth," and was consistently misunderstood. Nothing 
is more illustrative of the comparative shallowness of 
the Augustan Age than Swift's solitariness in it. 

There has been, however, especially in the shorter bio- 
graphies of Swift, a great deal of injustice done the man. 
Those that have not been misled by a phrase or two or 
by the unfairness of Irish biographers, who knew Swift 



JONATHAN SWIFT 155 

only in his decline, or of Dr. Johnson, who had a strong 
prejudice against him, have frequently used too glaring 
colors for the sake of effect. It makes a very pretty 
story and gives excellent opportunity for striking para- 
dox to believe that Swift was benevolent yet ungrateful, 
loving yet brutally resentful, eager for renown yet indif- 
ferent to praise. Thackeray, whose knowledge of Van- 
ity Fair should have saved him his blunders, mars his 
account, in many ways the most sympathetic, by hasty 
inferences and play to the gallery. The author of Van- 
ity Fair and The Newcomes, whose Life of Swift will 
continue to be read long after more accurate accounts 
by unknown hands, should have been particularly care- 
ful and moderate. To take one example, Thackeray 
speaks of "the guilty, lonely wretch, shuddering over 
the grave of his victim " — a remark which the reader 
must interpret as applied to a man who, though refusing 
to marry openly one woman, Esther Johnson, had yet 
kept her in subjugated exile, and who, after openly refus- 
ing to marry another woman, Hester Vanhomrigh, had 
treated her so brutally that he killed her. Professor A. 
S. Hill, in the North American Review for 1868, was 
one of the first to give Swift fair play. He showed that 
Thackeray's opinion in this instance was the result of 
hasty inference, that there was no direct evidence to 
prove the calumnious reports, in the case either of Miss 
Johnson or of Miss Vanhomrigh, and that, on excellent 
testimony. Swift, instead of being the cruel hater of 
womankind, as Thackeray asserts, was, quite the opposite, 
the one man of his time who strove to exalt tile position 
of woman in an age of loose principles and superficial 
decency. It is undoubtedly true that Swift's realism was 
often brutal, that his pride was insatiable, that he did 



156 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

not know how to forgive and forget. It is neverthe- 
less important to remember, when his faults have been 
summed up and his strikingly brutal satire has made us 
wince, that such men as Addison, Oxford, and Boling- 
broke found him, in his most characteristic moments, 
of a sweet and loving disposition. Addison says he was 
" the most agreeable companion, the truest friend, and 
the greatest genius of his times." It is misleading to 
judge Swift by occasional sentences which, though said 
with great gravity, may very well have been " excellent 
fooling," could we recall all the exact circumstances that 
attended their utterance. Taken alone, they sound brutal 
enough, to be sure. Of some malice it is certainly impos- 
sible to acquit him. Still, these sharp sayings are for the 
most part more picturesque than significant; on their 
account it is unjust to call Swift a "hangman," as does 
Taine, or a " Yahoo," as does Thackeray. It is, further- 
more, wholly unfair to judge him by the last fifteen 
years of his life, when he was sunk in bitterness and 
insanity. 

Jonathan Swift, the son of Jonathan and Abigail, 
was born in Dublin on the 30th of November, 1667. 
His parents were English; and the Dean always re- 
sented the imputation that he was an Irishman, though 
he finally took up the Irish cause with patriotic zeal. 
Dr. Johnson characteristically dismisses the subject 
with: "Whatever was his birth, his education was 
Irish." Thackeray gives a much truer estimate. " Gold- 
smith," he says, "was an Irishman, and always an Irish- 
man; Steele was an Irishman, and always an Irishman; 
Swift's heart was English and in England, his habits 
English, his logic eminently English; his statement is 
elaborately simple ; he shuns tropes and metaphors, and 



JONATHAN SWIFT 157 

uses ideas and words witli a wise thrift and economy, 
as he used his money." 

A strange sort of loneliness beset Swift at the out- 
set. His father died before the boy was born, and his 
mother, failing in health, removed in his early child- 
hood to her native Leicester. Jonathan was thus left 
for his education to his vmcle Godwin, who sent him to 
Kilkenny school, the Eton of Ireland, where he made 
friends with Cougreve. Swift later remarked that his 
uncle had given him " the education of a dog," to 
which he received the reply, it is said, that he then 
had not " the gratitude of a dog." From most accounts 
he showed in school and college no signs of future 
greatness, though he says that he could read any chap- 
ter of the Bible when he was three years old, so well 
was he taught by an old nurse, who kidnapped him 
and carried him off to Whitehaven for over two years. 
In 1682 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where, 
after many visits to Irish inns and an exhibition of 
general waywardness and dullness, he finally received, 
in February, 1685, by " special grace " the degree of 
B. A. His Physics was registered as done " badly ; " 
his Greek and Latin " well ; " and his Theme " negli- 
gently." It is fair to add that the dullest sort of anti- 
quated logic was the chief diet of university education 
in the reigns of Charles II and James II ; and it is 
hence not remarkable that Swift, whose keen mind de- 
manded real nourishment, took little interest in scho- 
lastic success. He continued to study in Dublin for a few 
years, but, on the outbreak of the war in which Wil- 
liam routed the army of James at the Boyne, he left 
for England. There it was necessary to find work, for 
he had as yet no money and no reputation. A desire 



158 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

for Independence, which had already taught him rigid 
economy, had, moreover, taken complete possession of 
him. 

Swift's presence at this time was probably not very 
striking, though later it was commanding. Scott says 
the young Irishman was " tall, strong, and well-made, of 
a dark complexion, but with blue eyes . . . and features 
which remarkably expressed the stern, haughty, and 
dauntless turn of his mind. He was never known to 
laugh." Pope, who could see very little bad in Swift, 
says the Dean's " eyes were as azure as the heavens 
and had an unusual expression of acuteness." Dr. John- 
son, on the other hand, who could see very little good 
in him, asserts that " he had a kind of muddy complex- 
ion " and " a countenance sour and severe." Like all 
the Augustan wits, save Pope, he was portly. In his 
personal habits he was clean, " with oriental scrupu- 
losity," says Dr. Johnson. He was fond of exercise, 
especially of walking. Every year of his stay at Moor 
Park, in Surrey, he walked to Leicester to visit his 
mother. He seems to have had a belief that much 
walking would rid him of a tendency to deafness, gid- 
diness, and scrofula — a malady caused, he thought, by 
a surfeit of apples at Moor Park, a theory dismissed 
by Dr. Johnson with " Almost every boy eats as much 
fruit as he can get, without any great inconvenience." 
There is no doubt, however, that this malady, from 
whatever cause, hastened Swift's insanity in later life. 

When he first came to England, in 1689, Swift re- 
ceived an appointment under Sir William Temple, an 
accomplished scholar, rhetorician, and diplomatist of the 
Restoration, a man of considerable fame, who had retired 
in his old age to Moor Park. Swift's position was that 



JONATHAN SWIFT 159 

of an under-secretary. He ate in the kitchen, wrote for 
his master when desired, and had the use of Sir Wil- 
liam's well-stocked library. The position was sufficiently 
dependent, however, to gall Swift's independent spirit. 
He never could endure an inferior position. At Moor 
Park he craved recognition and appreciation; later, in 
London, where the great wits and lords thronged about 
him, he had grown bitter and insulted the admiration 
which he craved. 

It must not be supposed, however, that Sir William 
Temple was an unkind patron. Indeed, Swift so rose 
in his esteem that he was recommended by Temple to 
King William. But Swift on his part was impatient. 
In 1694 he quarreled with his patron and left for Ire- 
land. Soon, however, he returned to seek Temple's re- 
commendation for his ordination in the ministry. The 
old courtier, with the large view of a man accustomed 
to granting favors, generously responded. In 1695 Swift 
was ordained priest and given the Prebend of Kilroot, 
worth about .£100 a year. Soon tiring, however, of life 
in a remote country district, and finding a young mar- 
ried clergyman who needed the help of a living, he re- 
signed Kilroot and returned in 1696 to Moor Park. 

Just before leaving his Irish parish. Swift wrote to 
the sister of a college friend, to a Miss Jane Waring, 
whom he affectionately addressed as " Varina." He sol- 
emnly offered " to forego all [that is, chances of English 
preferment] for her sake." Yarina, however, did not 
agree, and her action may have accounted to a great 
extent for his readiness to return to Moor Park and 
dependence. For some years she resisted his entreaties, 
on the ground of her ovm ill-health and his want of 
fortune. In 1700, however, when he had advanced in 



160 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

the world, she considered the difficulty removed. Swift 
replied in a brutal letter. He reproaches her with the 
company in which she lives, including her mother ; and 
he says that, though he doubts her improved health, if 
she will " submit to be educated so as to be capable of 
entertaining him," he will take her, " without inquiring 
into her looks or her income." Swift's treatment of 
Varina was of course unpardonable, however much she 
deserved snubbing ; it is not, nevertheless, as some like 
to believe, a fair indication of his general attitude 
towards women. 

To return to Swift at Moor Park. Two great things 
he gained there, — the use of Sir William Temple's ex- 
cellent library and the undying friendship of Esther 
Johnson, the adopted child of his patron. As a result 
of the first his literary style blossomed and bore fruit, 
for the manuscripts of his two great satires, A Tale 
of a Tub and ITie Battle of the Books, were finished 
by 1698, though they were not published till 1704. So 
great are they that Dr. Johnson doubted whether Swift 
wrote them, and Swift himself was heard to mutter in 
later years, as he turned the pages of A Tale of a Tub, 
" Good God, what a genius I had when I wrote that 
book!" 

The name of Esther Johnson, the well-known " Stella," 
the girl who made Moor Park more than tolerable for 
Swift, is inseparably linked with his ; it runs like a ray 
of simshine through the gloom of his life. When he was 
at the zenith of his power, dictating even to Harley, 
the Prime Minister, and St. John, the Secretary of State, 
his greatest pleasure was in his letters to her ; she should 
know all that went on in London. Again, when the 
chance of even deferred preferment was gone, when 



JONATHAN SWIFT 161 

Swift " fired his pistols into the air " and returned to 
Ireland, to " die like a rat in a hole," his one com- 
fort was in the friendship of Stella. And when she died, 
love passed out of his life, and he dragged out fifteen 
years of despair and insanity. 

The death of Sir William Temple in 1699 cast Swift 
almost penniless on the world. Already the stream of 
his life had set one way. A morbid desire for praise and 
contempt for those who gave it, growing distrust of man- 
kind, insatiable pride, a mind too keen to find complete 
sympathy, — these qualities made up the sad equipment 
with which he stepped, already isolated, into the new 
century. This period is marked by certain resolutions. 
One particularly is remarkable : " Not to be fond of 
children, or let them come near me hardly." This 
strange man, thinking perhaps of Stella at the moment 
he wrote, was fortifying himself against those he loved. 

After Temple's death Swift got a position as secretary 
to Lord Berkeley, but he lost it soon after arriving at 
Dublin. He then (1700) received a living at Laracor, 
a village about twenty miles from Dublin, with a salary 
of £230 a year and a congregation that did not often 
exceed fifteen in number. Though Swift did much to 
improve the living, he felt the meanness of the position 
as keenly as the dependence at Moor Park. While small 
men were rising rung on rung, here was he, the keenest 
mind in the kingdom, unknown in a country parish. It 
is told that one stormy day when only the sexton, one 
Roger, attended worship. Swift in all gravity began the 
service : " Dearly beloved Roger, the scripture moveth 
thee and me." Whether- the story is true or not, it is 
very characteristic of the author of A Tale of a Tub. 

One pleasant feature of the life at Laracor was the 



162 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

coming of Esther Johnson. She, with Mrs. Dingley, 
an old retainer of Sir William Temple's, took a 
house in the neighborhood. The monotony of the period, 
moreover, was broken by frequent visits to London ; at 
least four years between 1700 and 1710 were spent in 
the capital. The Tale of a Tub and the Bickerstaff 
Almanac^ a satirical pamphlet in which Swift dealt 
the deathblow to charlatan astrologers, brought him 
into literary prominence. * In London he met the great 
wits and for the most part despised them, though he al- 
ways had a word of praise for the great Mr. Addison, and 
later for Pope and Gay. But Swift was too outspoken to 
curry favor ; while others slipped into easy berths, he 
remained the incumbent of Laracor. The issue in 1708 
was largely on church matters, and the New-Church 
Whigs were in the ascendency. Swift, past forty years 
of age, saw bishoprics and foreign embassies slip through 
his fingers. For though he supported the Revolution of 
1688 and disapproved heartily of the Stuart principles 
of government, he remained a stanch Tory and High- 
Churchman to the end. In 1710, however, Marlborough, 
the hero of Blenheim, and his followers were turned out 
in favor of Harley and St. John, the Tories. This 
brought Swift to England once more, and for the next 
three years he enjoyed his greatest power. The Tory 
leaders at once recognized the influence of his pen, at a 
time when the pamphlet, now supplanted by newspaper 
reports of parliamentary speeches, was the chief political 
weapon ; and Swift, without any actual position, rose 
for a brief time to a veritable dictatorship. 

1 The Bickerstaff Almanac was particularly directed against one 
Partridge. Swift had predicted, among other things, Partridge's death, 
and, when the date came round, published a verification. Partridge, de- 
spite his protestations of existence, could no longer gain an audience. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 163 

It is well to consider a moment, before noticing the 
arrogance of Swift at this time. In the first place, he 
was already forty-three in 1710 ; his habits and man- 
ners were formed. In the formation of those manners, 
in the next place, he had not gone through a political 
apprenticeship. Quite the contrary, he had struggled 
through half a lifetime, unfriended for the most part 
when he needed friends bitterly, dependent when he 
craved independence, as a poor student, an amanuen- 
sis, and a "hedge-parson." Since he was a young man 
he had possessed a desire to dominate those whom the 
world pointed out as his superiors ; and twenty years is 
a long time for an impatient man to wait for recognition. 
When, then, by the skill of his pen he suddenly jumped 
into political prominence, his arrogance and his contempt 
for the ruling classes were strongly developed. It is 
worth remembering that, however violently he came to 
despise mankind in the abstract, he was always a friend 
and a hero among the poor. He was arrogant only 
towards that class which he had learned to suspect of 
arrogance. And by the time he entered its ranks his 
habits of thought were irrevocably fixed. 

No man in England was more feared or honored than 
Swift between 1710 and 1713. Once a week he dined 
with Harley and St. John. Harley called that day his 
" whipping day," and we may be sure the political syco- 
phants were well scourged, for Swift had a sharp 
tongue and spoke " the plain truth." When Harley had 
sent him fifty pounds, in payment for literary services, 
Swift refused the money, demanded an apology, received 
one, and then wrote to Stella : " I have taken Mr. Har- 
ley into favor again." And of St. John he says : " One 
thing I warned him of, never to appear cold to me, for 



164 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

I would not be treated like a schoolboy." The famous 
General Webb, who had fought so well at Oudenarde, 
hobbled up two flights of stairs to congi-atulate Swift and 
invite him to dinner. Swift accepted and then an hour 
later changed his mind. In such manner did he treat 
the great, the rich, and the powerful. " I will never beg 
for myself," he said, " though I often do it for others." 
There are many stories about the great satirist during 
his brief dictatorship. It is said that when dining with 
the Earl of Burlington, he remarked to the mistress of 
the house : " Lady Burlington, I hear you can sing ; sing 
me a song." Upon her refusing this unceremonious 
request, he replied that she should sing or he would 
make her. " Why, madam, I suppose you take me for 
one of your poor English hedge-parsons ; sing when I 
bid you." Lady Burlington retired in tears. When Swift 
next saw her the first thing he is said to have remarked 
was : " Pray, madam, are you as proud and iU-natured 
as when I saw you last ? " Were such things merely 
pleasantries on the part of the gruff satirist? Through 
all his writings there runs a dry humor, grim enough at 
times, which might account, if the whole situations could 
be reproduced, for many of his blunt sayings. Were they 
the result of iU-timed humor, or of boorishness (for 
Swift was nearly forty before he saw much of fashion- 
able life), or of natural, uncontrolled brutality? Bio- 
graphers have been rather headlong in deciding for the 
third quality ; there was very reasonably a large mix- 
ture of the three. It is significant that Swift thought 
so little of the mere delights of higher social circles that 
he never went to a coffee-house, the rendezvous of the 
elite, except for a letter ; and the step from indifference 
to hate was but a short one. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 165 

Swift has been accused, however, of a like brutality to 
servants. Dr. Johnson, in commenting upon his " per- 
petual tyrannick peevishness," relates how Swift, when 
dining with the Earl of Orrery, said of one of the 
servants, " That man has, since we sat at table, com- 
mitted fifteen faults." But Swift, who always prided 
himself on exact discipline in his own household, was 
at the time of this remark near enough insanity to 
take a childish delight in his accurate observation. His 
own servants, like the poor of his parish, loved him as 
they feared him ; and they willingly put up with his little 
foibles, such as calling them back, in one instance, from 
a journey already begun, to " please to close the door." 
A good instance of the sly humor with which he re- 
proved and corrected them is the story that he once 
sent out some overdone meat with orders that it should 
be done a little less. "But how can I?" asked the 
cook. " Then be careful next time," said Swift, " to 
commit a fault which can be remedied." 

For a time, then. Swift was in great favor with the 
Tory leaders. In 1710-11 he ran the Examiner^ a 
political sheet, strong because he saw what was on 
every one's lips and said it clearly and concisely. In 
1713, however, the Tories went out of power. Swift, 
whose humor had always bordered on irony, became 
despondent, wrote more venomously, and resented bit- 
terly personal attacks. From this time on his mockery 
of human ambitions grew more violent. He did not 
become a bishop ; his desire for complete power was 
never satisfied ; he felt defeated. The climax of his life 
had been reached, and the catastrophe hurried after. 
Finally, the Deanery of St. Patrick's, with a debt of 
.£1000, was held out to him, and he accepted it, — not 



166 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

as a just reward, but as a forlorn hope ; not in the 
spirit of enthusiasm, but in that of ingratitude and 
despair. He returned to England in 1714, to try again, 
but with no success ; and with Anne's death all chances 
of preferment for the Tory were at an end. 

Such was the bright period of this man's life, — 
bright only in contrast to the gloom of later years. 
Soon after returning to Ireland he took up the cause 
of the Irish with vigorous zeal. England was at fault, 
— in his mind, wholly so. There was in him nothing 
of tlie calm rebuke of Addison, nothing of the gentle 
merriment of Steele, nothing of the spiteful ridicule 
of Pope. StiU speaking " the plain truth," he spoke 
it with an irony sharper than plainness, — a bruising, 
unrelenting irony. Among the Irish poor, however, he 
was a great man, honored for his fearlessness, loved 
for his generosity. When still a struggling parson he 
gave a tithe of his income to charity ; when Dean, he 
gave a third, sometimes a half. His thrift was never 
at the expense of his starving, down-ttodden country- 
men. So unhesitatingly did they believe in him, in 
fact, that once when people had left their work on 
account of a predicted eclipse, Swift had only to say, 
in order to bring them back to work, that the eclipse 
had been postponed by order of the Dean of St. Pat- 
rick's. Sir Robert Walpole, who threatened to arrest 
Swift for his bold writings, was advised not to do it 
" unless you have ten thousand men behind the war- 
rant." 

During one of Swift's visits to London in the days 
of Laracor he met a young lady named Hester Van- 
homrigh. There was no doubt a good deal of affection 
on Swift's part, but it was largely that of a teacher to 



JONATHAN SWIFT 167 

a pupil, as he tried to show in his poem, Cadenus and 
Vanessa. But Vanessa took the matter much more 
seriously, wrote him many letters, and finally followed 
him to Ireland. There the question of Stella's relation 
to Swift arose. Vanessa wrote to Stella, who showed 
the letter to Swift. There is a story that he took the 
letter in a rage, threw it down on the table before Miss 
Vanhomrigh, and stalked out silently. Much has been 
made, too, of the romantic manner of Vanessa's death, 
which occurred soon afterwards, but it has been pointed 
out that both her brothers and her younger sister had 
died before her and that her own health had always 
been weak. It is unfair, spectacular, to accuse Swift of 
" killing " her by his brutality. 

Before considering the much mooted question. Swift's 
relation to Stella, it is well to notice his general atti- 
tude towards women. There is plenty of evidence that 
he held strong theories against a man's marrying before 
his fortune was secure, that he had, in fact, a horror of 
it. He determined, moreover, never to marry unless he 
could marry young. The inconsistency of his addresses 
to Varina, when he was decidedly poor, is repealed often 
enough in the lives of poor young men to be in no 
sense remarkable. This theory- of his in regard to 
marriage, furthermore, was backed up by his disgust 
at the neglect of women who had passed the limits of 
youth and beauty ; in an age when woman was too often 
treated as a mere commodity, he did much to exalt her 
position, to assert the necessity of her companionship, 
whether she was old or young, a wife or a friend. Such 
a view, at first glance, conflicts strangely with what 
often appears to be his brutal treatment of certain 
women, such as Lady Burlington or Vanessa ; Thackeray 



168 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

calls him a " bully," " wlio made women cry and ^ests 
look foolish." But on examination it develops that he 
thought more highly of women than did most of his 
contemporaries, and that his occasional outbursts were 
accountable to his irony's momentarily getting the 
better of him or to his contempt for the amenities of 
society. 

Swift's Journal to Stella, written chiefly in the 
years 1710-13, is full of playfully affectionate expres- 
sions. Here is an example : " I assure oo it im vely 
late now ; but zis goes to-morrow ; and I must have 
some time to converse with own deerichar MD. Nite 
de deer Sollahs." And again : " And now let us see 
what this saucy, dear letter of MD says. . . . What 
says Pdf to me, pray? says it. Come and let me 
answer to you for your ladies. Hold up your head, then, 
like a good letter." ^ It must be remembered that at 
Moor Park Stella had been a mere girl. Swift's pupil. 
What he writes is perhaps no more than playfulness — 
especially in Swift, whose great, lonely mind must have 
craved relief in a little " sublime foolishness." There 
is no proof, furthermore, that Stella ever lived alone 
with Swift. If she lived in the same house in Ireland 
— a thing highly improbable, for any length of time 
at least — Mrs. Dingley was there too. There is 
certainly nothing remarkable in the fact that two 
women — one old and the other no longer young — 
should live in great intimacy with a clergyman of 
middle age. When Vanessa asked Stella whether she 
was married to Swift, Stella said " Yes," but this can 

1 There are various hypothetical explanations of Swift's " little 
languag'e." MD=my dear; Sollahs=: Sirrah(?); Pdf (Podefar) = 
Swift, possibly Poor, dear, foolish Rogue. 



JONATHAN SWIFT 169 

hardly be taken as proof ; it must be remembered that 
the same Stella, when she heard that Swift had written 
beautifully about Vanessa, remarked, " We all know 
the Dean could write beautifully about a broom-stick." ^ 
Swift himself, who nowhere intimates that they were 
married, frequently emphasizes the platonic nature of 
their friendship : — 

" Thou, Stella, wert no longer young 
When first for thee my harp I strung, 
Without one word of Cupid's darts, 
Of killing eyes or bleeding hearts; 
'With, friendship and esteem possess'd 
I ne'er admitted love a guest." 

There are many witnesses on both sides. It looks as 
if Swift, by the time Stella came to Ireland, had fully 
made up his mind not to marry ; or, if he did marry, 
as if he wanted to keep the marriage a secret. Stella 
was at all events not displeased with whatever arrange- 
ments were made. It is, moreover, wholly unfair to 
suspect Swift of foul play. Few men in his day were 
so scrupulously moral as he ; so much did he detest 
profligacy and uncleanness, indeed, that his mockery of 
vice becomes a morbid interest. 

Whatever his connection with Stella, then. Swift 
was for thirty years devoted to her. What little sym- 
pathy crept into his lonely existence was from her ; 
and those who forget or ignore his long, unbroken 
affection for the person who was his pupil and friend 
miss wholly tbe tragedy of his life. On hearing of her 
illness, while he was in London in 1726, he wrote to a 
friend : " This was a person of my own rearing and 
instructing from childhood, who excelled in every good 

^ Swift wrote for Lady Berkeley his Meditations upon a Broom-Stick, 
published in 1704. 



170 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

quality that can possibly accomplish a human creature. 
. . . Dear Jim, pardon me, I know not what I am 
saying ; but believe me, that violent friendship is much 
more lasting than violent love." 

Swift's story is nearly told ; for the sad end, which 
dragged itself through thirty years, began with his 
return to Ireland. Once again, when the fame of the 
M. B. Drapier Letters (1724), which attacked savagely 
the abortive scheme of Wood's halfpence, brought him 
into prominence, he returned to England, seeking pre- 
ferment. Failing here, he went back to Ireland, — a 
" coal-pit," as he called it, " a wretched, dirty dog-hole 
and prison," " a place good enough to die in." 

On his trip to England, when he visited Pope at 
Twickenham, he took with him Gulliver's Travels^ 
published the same year (1726). The first two parts, 
the visits to the Lilliputians and Brobdingnags, be- 
gun some years earlier, are fascinating to both old and 
young ; even those who miss the satire delight in the 
ingenious narrative. Towards the end of the book, 
however, the satire, marking as it does Swift's declin- 
ing intellect, grows savage and repulsive. " He be- 
comes disgusting," says Leslie Stephen, " in the effort 
to express his disgust." In the Houyhnhnms, a kind 
of horses, social conditions far superior to those in 
England are discovered, and the Yahoos, their bestial 
servants, out-Caliban Caliban in hideous, half-human 
ferocity. Swift had long been disgusted with the petti- 
ness and coarseness of English society ; he had, more- 
over, long had a grudge against the English nation; 
and now, in his savage old age, his irony and brutal 
satire get the better of him. Yet Taine, after a review 
of the rottenness of English society during the reign 



JONATHAN SWIFT 171 

of George I, concludes " that the Yahoo whom he de- 
picted he had seen, and that the Yahoo, whether naked 
or riding in his carriage, is not beautiful." 

The death of Stella, in 1728, only aggravated Swift's 
despair and bitterness. The treatment of the Irish, more- 
over, had lashed him into madness ; and the gravity 
with which he spoke was more terrible than the explo- 
sion would have been if he had burst out in mania. In 
1729 he came out solemnly with A Modest Proposal for 
Preventing the Children of Poor Peoplein Ireland from 
being a Burden to their Parents or Country. And what 
was the Dean's Modest Proposal, made in such bitter 
gravity ? Merely that five sixths of the Irish children 
should be fattened and eaten. " I rather recommend," he 
says calmly, " buying the children alive, than dressing 
them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs." Truly 
an awful, inverted way of calling attention to the ex- 
treme poverty of Ireland. But with Swift the thing had 
got beyond expostulation ; it had become a madman's 
jest. 

Fortunately he soon passed the vigor of these brutal 
expressions. Years before, he had prophesied, on seeing 
an old ash tree, " I shall die as that tree, from the top 
down." He continued to write considerably until 1738, 
and in some of his work, notably PoZi^e Conversation s^nA 
Directions to Servants, showed his old satiric power. 
But by 1738 the malady which had threatened him ever 
since his youth took strong hold of him. Not long after 
he developed fits of mania, during which it was difficult 
for his attendants to restrain him from tearing out a 
suffering eye. By 1740 he sank into a kind of torpor, 
broken only by occasional bursts of savageness or petti- 
ness. Once he was heard to mutter, " I am what I am ; 



172 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

I am what I am." And he is said to have written the 
following epigram while on a walk with his attend- 
ants : — 

" Behold a proof of Irish sense ! 
Here Irish wit is seen ! 
When nothing 's left that 's worth defense, 
They build a magazine." 

Thus he lingered till the 19th of October, 1745, when, 
after a night of great pain, he died quietly at three 
in the afternoon. Most of his carefully saved fortune, 
£12,000, he left to found St. Patrick's Hospital for 
the insane — an awful legacy for an insane man to 
comtemplate! Swift saw the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death while yet a long way off, and must needs ride 
alone down the strait road. On his grave is inscribed: 

" Ubi saeva indignatio 
Cor ulterius lacerare nequit." 

The character of the great Dean is altogether too 
complex to be summed up in a glib phrase. He was not 
a " bully," a " footpad," or a " Yahoo ; " yet it would 
be presumptuous, on the other hand, to assert that his 
savage style was a quite necessary rebuke to his times. 
It is more fitting, in closing, to call attention to the 
chief elements, however conflicting, that composed so 
unhappy and so savage a nature. 

Whoever holds the most partial brief for Swift must 
admit that he early showed most of his weaker charac- 
teristics : false, insatiable pride, distrust of mankind, 
instinctive cynicism, and misanthropy. There is no doubt, 
on the other hand, of his genuine hatred of sham, his 
sincerity ; Bolingbroke called his character " hypocrisy 
reversed." His savage style, moreover, at first a manner- 
ism rather than a manner, was not the most character- 



JONATHAN SWIFT 173 

istic thing about him till he reached middle age. Then 
his loneliness, partly the result of his intellectual un- 
congeniality and superiority, partly the result of the 
circumstances of his life, developed in him a bitterness 
which towards the end passed all bounds of moderation. 
He did finally become a scourge, a mad jester upon life. 
Taine calls Swift the most unhappy genius in history. 
Certainly the melancholy of such men as Byron seems 
like childish pettishness beside the misery of Swift, a 
misery as great, as inevitable, as inexorable as classic 
Fate. "An immense genius," says Thackeray; "an 
awful downfall and ruin. So great a man he seems to 
me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an em- 
pire falling." And Taine concludes : " A philosopher 
against all philosophy, he created a realistic poem, 
a grave parody, deduced like geometry, absurd as a 
dream, credible as a law report, attractive as a tale, 
degrading as a dishclout placed like a crown on the 
head of a divinity. These were his miseries and his 
strength ; we quit such a spectacle with a sad heart, but 
full of admiration ; and we say that a palace is beau- 
tiful even when it is on fire. Artists will add : especially 
when it is on fire." 



JOSEPH ADDISON 

"It is no small thing to make morality fashionable. 
Addison did it, and it remained in fashion." These 
words by Taine sum up the greatness of Addison's 
genius. The task which was set before him was a deli- 
cate one; Swift, Steele, and Pope were all, for one or 
another reason, unqualified to perform it ; and it was 
only through his own patience, his breadth of view, his 
quiet gentlemanliness, and his wit which left no sting 
that Addison was able to attain success. As a writer 
of poetry he rarely rises above the mediocrity of his 
contemporaries ; but as an essayist on his own ground 
he is unsurpassed in any age ; and as the most success- 
ful moralist, the man with an effective message to the 
people of his day, he towers above all. 

Joseph Addison, the eldest son of Lancelot Addison 
and Jane Gulston, was born May 1, 1672, at Milston, 
in Wiltshire. His father, at the time of Joseph's birth 
rector of Milston, was a man of experience and accom- 
plishment. He had been chaplain in Dunkirk and 
Tangier, in 1675 was made a prebendary of Salisbury 
Cathedral, and in 1683 was awarded the Deanery of 
Lichfield. As a writer he had considerable contempo- 
rary reputation, especially for his works on Mohammed- 
anism and Judaism. 

Thus young Joseph, perhaps as much as any English 
author of note, grew up in an atmosphere of refine- 
ment, scholarship, and piety. It has been pointed out, too, 
that his boyhood must have received a strong impres- 



JOSEPH ADDISON 175 

slon from tlie peaceful scenery of Wiltshire : the gently 
rolling Salisbury plain, with the ancient fragments of 
Stonehenge standing boldly on the treeless Downs, 
the winding Avon, with its deep summer shade, and 
Salisbujry spire ever in the southern sky as he trudged 
to school at Amesbury. This is no doubt more 
than a fancy, for in later life, however little he 
may have reveled Byron-wise in beetling crags and 
the wild sea-wave, Addison preferred the natural 
beauty of Fontainebleau to the precise formality of 
Versailles. In a letter to Congreve he says : " I . . . 
wou'd as soon see a River winding through woods and 
meadows as when it is tossed up in such a variety of 
figures at Versailles." And in the Spectator, No. 
444 : " I do not know whether I am singular in my 
Opinion, but for my part I would rather look upon a 
Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and 
Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into 
a Mathematical Figure." This is of especial interest, 
because a delight in formality was, generally speaking, 
the characteristic of the age. Addison was in most 
senses thoroughly Augustan, but his lack of enthusi- 
asm for the Alps has too often been magnified, by 
reasoning from a possibility, into a profound horror for 
natural beauty. It is precisely by such little differ- 
ences as Addison's appreciation of Fontainebleau that 
a man's individuality takes on a distinctive reality. 

When Addison's father moved to Lichfield the boy 
was sent to the town grammar school. There, Dr. John- 
son tells us, Joseph planned and conducted a harring- 
out. " The practice of barring-out," continues Dr. John- 
son, " was a savage license, practiced in many schools 
toward the end of the last [17th] century, by which the 



176 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

boys, when tlie periodical vacation drew near, growing 
petulant at the approach of liberty, some days before 
the regular recess, took possession of the school, of 
which they barred the doors, and bade their master de- 
fiance from the windows." The savage vigor of young 
Joseph in this instance, in great contrast to his pro- 
verbial calmness and gentlemanly behavior, has been 
much quoted and very likely magnified. 

From Lichfield Addison passed to the Charter House 
School, then in London, and long since famous for its 
roll of illustrious students. There he gained a reputa- 
tion for scholarship and wrote Latin verses, one of the 
necessary accomplishments of an Augustan gentleman, 
with fluency and conventional skill. In fact, intellec- 
tual success always came easily to him. At Charter 
House he, became a great friend of Dick Steele, an 
impetuous Irish boy of his own age. Thackeray says 
Steele fagged for Addison, in payment for assistance 
in his work. This is hardly likely, for the boys were of 
the same age ; but there is no doubt that Steele showed 
from the first for his gentlemanly scholar-friend an al- 
most servile loyalty which easily found a place in his 
affectionate nature. 

With no reverses to check his advance, Addison went 
in 1687 to Queen's College, Oxford. After two years 
his Latin verses procured him a demyship — "a term," 
Johnson says, " by which that society denominates those 
which are elsewhere called scholars " — in Magdalen 
College, and in 1693 he received the Master's degree. 
In 1697 he was elected Probationary Fellow and the 
next year actual Fellow — a position which he retained 
till 1711. At Oxford Addison's reputation for scholar- 
ship and good conduct increased. The shady avenue 



JOSEPH ADDISON 177 

of elms along tlie Cher well, hard by the College, con- 
jures up perhaps more vividly than anything the seren- 
ity and meditative study of his years at Oxford. It is 
now known as "Addison's Walk." 

While at the University Addison wrote, in 1693, an 
Account of the Greatest English Poets. This poem 
is interesting chiefly because it is his first considerable 
composition in P^nglish. In it the Latin classics are too 
frequently an infallible standard, Dryden and Con- 
greve are the chief representatives of the Drama, there 
is no mention of Shakespeare, and Cowley is considered 
a " mighty genius." 

Addison, who was by nature exceedingly shy, — so 
much so, in fact, that his great gifts of conversation 
never appeared to advantage except when he was with 
one or two friends, — had little inclination to take orders, 
a step usually necessary to the retention of the fellow- 
ship. He was much influenced in his decision, more- 
over, by a pension of £300, granted him by the Crown 
in 1699 through the aid of his friend Charles Mon- 
tagu, later known as Lord Halifax. The object of 
this pension was to allow Addison by foreign travel 
to prepare himself for state affairs. The value to the 
state of an able writer, in the days when telegraphy was 
unknown and the newspaper in its infancy, when the 
place of parliamentary speeches, now printed all over 
the world the same day they are delivered, was taken 
by the pamphlet, was incalculably great. Montagu and 
Lord Somers were quick to fix upon the young and 
accomplished Mr. Addison as their protege, and Addi- 
son, who eagerly embraced the opportunity, started on 
his travels in 1699. 

The period of his travels extended over four years. 



178 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

After a short stay at Paris and visits to Versailles and 
Fontainebleau, lie went direct to Blois, where he re- 
mained nearly eighteen months. Having at last acquired 
with considerable difficulty a knowledge of French, he 
returned to Paris, where, before starting for Italy, he 
met the great French critic Boileau, who, though old 
and peculiarly sparing of compliment, praised Addison's 
Latin verses very highly. To-day no critic is looked up 
to as a final arbiter, so it is perhaps difficult for us to 
appreciate how much it meant to Addison to receive 
this praise from a man who had set the fashions in 
French literature as Louis XIV had set them in 
society. 

In December, 1700, the traveler embarked at Mar- 
seilles for Genoa. Thence he visited nearly all the 
important towns and cities of Italy, as far south as 
Naples. In connection with his supposed aversion for 
the Alps, it is interesting that he mentions with plea- 
sure the crossing of the Apennines. He is more or- 
thodox, according to Augustan standards of art, in his 
inability to understand Gothic architecture. To the 
modern traveler, steeped in mediaeval lore and filled 
with curiosity for the past, Addison's opinion of Siena 
Cathedral is almost amusing. " Nothing in the world," 
he says, " can make a prettier show to those who pre- 
fer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble 
and majestic simplicity." 

On the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, Halifax 
and the Whigs went out of power, and Addison's pen- 
sion ceased. Though he was not forced to give up his 
travels immediately, his lack of resources probably 
hastened his return, which took place in 1703. For a 
short time he lived in London in a condition not much 



JOSEPH ADDISON 179 

better than that of the Grub Street "hack." Soon, 
however, he was taken into the famous Kit-Kat Club, 
B, half political, half literary society founded by Jacob 
Tonson, the bookseller. The club consisted of thirty- 
nine leaders of the Whig party, who, seeing the neces- 
sity of making a strong front against the Tories and 
the Queen, and appreciating the value of an able 
writer, readily elected Addison. This membership, 
though it did not at once relieve his poverty, put him 
in a position to gain great fame. For Godolphin, then 
Lord Treasurer, when Marlborough's successes had 
partly restored the Whigs to power, asked Halifax to 
suggest a poet who might celebrate the great victory of 
Blenheim. Addison was named, and the result was The 
Campaign. The poem acquired for Addison some lit- 
erary renown, as well as a Commissionership of Appeal 
in the Excise, and in 1706 the position of Under Secre- 
tary of State. 

At thirty-four, then, Addison had acquired a thor- 
ough education, had traveled extensively on the Con- 
tinent, and had reached a position of political impor- 
tance. It was about this time that he began, in his 
grave, gentlemanly fashion, to reign over the wits at 
Button's Coffee-House. His classical learning, his tal- 
ents for conversation and gentle wit, his good taste 
and critical judgment, easily gained him the honored 
position. Around him were grouped most of the great 
men of the day. Lord Halifax was his patron and 
friend ; Pope, the young author of the Pastorals, 
looked up to his calm judgment ; Dick Steele, his com- 
panion at school and college and later Captain of the 
Guard, was there too ; even the great Dr. Swift, bitterly 
jealous of fame, admired him and praised him in his 



180 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Journal to Stella. " Mr. Addison," he writes, " who 
goes over [to Ireland] First Secretary, is a most excel- 
lent person." Though his conversational powers were 
never shown to a crowd or to strangers, on account of 
his great shyness and reserve, yet if one or two friends 
stepped into Button's, Addison's discourse immediately 
charmed them. " There is no such thing," he said, " as 
real conversation but between two persons." 

But though every one admired him, few loved him. 
There was a touch of cold reserve, of self-sufficient 
superiority — a little too much truth in Pope's line 
that describes him as assenting "with civil leer," 
for any one to approach beyond the footstool of the 
great man. One picture represents him sitting alone 
in a coffee-house meditatively smoking his pipe and 
reading a paper, while the more genial frequenters 
crowd to the opposite corner. There was something 
just a little forbidding about his serenity ; as Thack- 
eray puts it, he never saw any piece of writing but he 
felt he could do it better. And Pope says of him : 
" With any mixture of strangers, and sometimes with 
only one, he seemed to preserve his dignity much, with 
a stiff sort of silence." His bashfulness, combined 
with his self-sufficiency, held men at arm's length from 
him. 

Yet one always feels that Addison was, next to 
Swift, the master mind of the age. As Swift was 
above others in keenness, Addison was above them in 
the scope of his intellect. He bore his greatness easily, 
as if it belonged to him. Indeed, his lack of ready sym- 
pathy may have been the result of a very real superi- 
ority to the men about him. 

Meanwhile Addison gradually rose in political im- 



JOSEPH ADDISON 181 

portance. In 1708 he was elected to the House of 
Commons, — a position acquired rather by the power 
of his pen than by his ability as an orator. He 
tried only once to speak and then failed dismally. 
Towards the close of the same year he was appointed 
Chief Secretary for Ireland. Though he lost this posi- 
tion in 1710, when the Tories came into power, he 
regained it again in 1714, on the accession of George I, 
but resigned it the following year for a seat on the 
Board of Trade. In 1717 he reached his highest 
political preferment, that of Secretary of State, under 
Lord Sunderland's ministry, but was forced by failing 
health to resign it in less than a year. 

Hand in hand with his political advance rose Ad- 
dison's literary fame. The Campaign was followed 
by more pretentious Kterary effort, of which the two 
most successful expressions were his drama Cato 
and his essays in the Sj)ectator. His other work, ex- 
cept for some of his contributions to periodicals, has 
sunk into insignificance as far as the general reading 
public goes. In 1706 his opera Rosamund was acted, 
but failed, chiefly on account of inferior music. In 
1715 he tried his hand at comedy in the Drum^mer^ 
but it, too, met with little enthusiasm, though after his 
death, when the author's fame and name were known, 
it was played with some success. Cato^ on the other 
hand, met with complete success, partly on account of 
the generous assistance of Steele and the excellent 
acting of Booth. It was not acted till 1713, though 
most of the first four acts had been written while 
Addison was on his travels in Italy. It was consid- 
ered by some to be a great argument for the Whigs, 
Cato struggling for the liberties of Rome being 



182 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

compared to Halifax and Wharton. But the Tories 
claimed its sentiments as their own ; and Addison, of 
course, profited by the enthusiasm of both parties. 
Among Addison's contemporaries it was probably the 
chief cause of his fame. 

It is in the Spectator^ however, that Addison is 
truly great. The Spectator was the child of Steele's 
paper, the Taller^ to which Addison had contributed. 
The first number of the Tatler appeared April 12, 
1709. Addison's first contribution was No. 18, and 
during the two years of the paper's publication he 
wrote 42 out of 271 numbers. The real author of the 
Tatler, then, was Steele, who wrote 188 numbers. 
Addison's share, however, was sufficient to give him 
the practice which resulted in the Spectator, a paper 
as characteristic of him as the Tatler is of Steele. 

The Spectator began March 1, 1711, and ran through 
655 issues before December 6, 1712, when its publi- 
cation was stopped for a year and a half. Addison con- 
tributed 274 numbers, Steele 236. The paper met with 
unprecedented success, and on its collection into octavo 
volumes, which were sold for a guinea apiece, more than 
nine thousand copies, Steele writes in the last number, 
were sold off. 

The general plan of the paper was probably con- 
ceived by Steele, and he also sketched the characters 
of Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain Sentry, the Templar, 
and the Clergyman, who stand as a background for 
the inimitable Sir Koger de Coverley and Will Honey- 
comb. For these two Addison is responsible, as well as 
for the character of the Spectator, which he probably 
drew largely from himself. Macaulay, in his essay 
on Addison, thus excellently gives us a picture of the 



JOSEPH ADDISON 183 

two in one — Addison the Spectator : " The Spectator 
himself is a gentleman who, after passing a studious 
youth at the university, has bestowed much attention 
on curious points of antiquity. He has, on his return, 
fixed his residence in London, and has observed all the 
forms of life which are to be found in that great city, 
has daily listened to the wits of Will's, has smoked 
with the philosophers of the Grecian, and has mingled 
with the parsons at Child's, and with the politicians at 
the St. James's. In the morning he often listens to 
the hiun of the Exchange ; in the evening, his face is 
constantly to be seen in the pit of the Drury Lane 
Theatre. But an insurmountable bashfulness prevents 
him from opening his mouth, except in a small circle 
of intimate friends." 

Though the Spectator would be very great had the 
Sir Roger de Coverley papers never been written, it 
is the story of the old knight and his friends that 
gives it its lasting fame. It is perhaps not too sweep- 
ing to say that no writer between Shakespeare and 
Fielding has portrayed so real or so delightful a char- 
acter as Sir Roger. After we have been with the old 
knight to church, to the theatre, and to the coffee-house, 
or have wandered with him for a day on his estate, — 
when, in fact, we have grown to love his simple vir- 
tues, his courtly manners, and his immemorial preju- 
dices, we no longer know the man in a book, as perish- 
able as the paper on which he is printed, but see him 
before us in person. 

The most significant feature of the Spectator^ how- 
ever, is its influence on the life of the Queen Anne 
Age. It was the best possible means of expression for 
Addison's message. Life during the Restoration had 



184 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

been notoriously, recklessly loose. There was, moreover, 
a kind of degenerate delight in guilt and folly ; men 
were not even genuinely vigorous in their wickedness ; a 
faded, jaded atmosphere, theati'ical, make-believe, hung 
over society. The chief thought was for the pleasure 
of the moment, with no real relish for that pleasure. 
True, there was plenty of wit, but it was no wit for 
gentlemen, much less for ladies. To be witty and yet 
virtuous had become unthinkable. It was not only 
against the open indecency, furthermore, that Addison 
took a stand, but against the meaningless frivolity, the 
vanity of society. Steele, by his plays and the Tat- 
ler, in which people were given wholesome reading 
and shown genuine interest and sympathy, coupled with 
delightful wit, had done much to improve matters. It 
remained for Addison, however, to lead men little by 
little, by hints rather than by denunciations, by satire 
that left no sting, to a cleaner, more genuine life. In 
No. 10 of the Spectator he outlines his purpose. 
" Since I have raised to myself so great an Audience," 
he says, " I shall spare no Pains to make their Instruc- 
tion agreeable and their Diversion useful. For which 
Reason I shall endeavor to enliven Morality with Wit, 
and to temper Wit with Morality. . . . And to the 
End that their Virtue and Discretion may not be short, 
transient, intermitting Starts of Thought, I have re- 
solved to refresh their Memories from Day to Day till 
I have recovered them out of that desperate State of 
Vice and Folly into which the Age has fallen. . . . 
It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy 
down from Heaven to inhabit among Men ; and I shall 
be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought 
Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and 



JOSEPH ADDISON 185 

Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea- 
tables and in Coffee-bouses." A knowledge of the Spec- 
tator and of Sir Roger wiU tell us more than all the 
commentaries written thereon about the character and 
the work of Addison. 

From time to time until near the close of his life 
Addison wrote for numerous periodicals. He contributed 
to the Guardian, which Steele had started as a suc- 
cessor to the Spectator ; but when Steele, for political 
reasons, dropped the Guardian and began the Eng- 
lishman, Addison, who was always a moderate Whig, 
refused to contribute. In 1714 he published alone an 
eighth volume of the Spectator, which ran through 
eighty numbers. " Nothing can be more striking," says 
Macaulay, " than the contrast between the Englishman 
and the eighth volume of the Spectator, between Steele 
without Addison and Addison without Steele." This 
criticism is no doubt too severe ; it was probably Steele 
with violent political opinions as much as Steele without 
Addison that condemned the Englishman. During the 
gener^ election in 1710 Addison published the Whig 
Examiner, in opposition to Swift's Examiner. " On 
no occasion," says Dr. Johnson, " was the genius of 
Addison more vigorously exerted." In 1715 he issued 
for a short time a political paper called the Freeholder. 
Steele naturally enough complained that it was too mod- 
erate, but his opposition paper, Town Talk, fell quite 
flat. The character of Lord Somers in the Freeholder, 
Nos. 22, 44, and 47, reflects the same master-hand that 
drew Sir Roger. 

It is a tribute to Addison's generosity to remember 
that in his political and literary success he did not for- 
get his friends. Tickell, Budgell, and Ambrose Phillipps 



186 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

were all provided for, his friend Craggs succeeded him 
as Secretary, and Steele, whose wild political views had 
shut him out from preferment, was raised to knight- 
hood. Even the Tory Swift, who had been Addison's 
political antagonist, retained a high admiration for the 
successful Whig. It may fairly be said, in fact, that 
Addison quarreled with no one, though two quarreled 
with him. His manner of complacent superiority no 
doubt aggravated the strife, but the quarrels were di- 
rectly provoked, in the one case, by the trickery of Pope, 
and in the other by the hot-headed ness of Steele. 

Addison's troubles with Pope began as early as 1713, 
when one John Dennis, who had already an old score 
with Pope, attacked Addison's play, Cato, for which 
Pope had written a prologue. Pope replied in an abusive 
pamphlet entitled the Narrative of the Frenzy of 
J. D} Addison, who had no wish to be implicated, 
sent word, perhaps a little too coolly, that he was quite 
capable of defending himself. Now Pope, who was a 
very suspicious person, had for years considered Addison 
a literary rival ; he looked with no little jealousy on the 
latter's successful reign over the wits at Button's. Thus 
it was an easy step for Pope, when his revised Rajie 
of the Lock (1714), which Addison had urged him 
not to recast, proved a huge success, to argue himself 
little by little into the belief that Addison was jealous 
of him, that the great essayist and Lord of Button's 
did in fact fear the rivalry of a "brother near the 
throne." As a result he changed to the offensive and 
attacked violently the Pastorals of Ambrose Phil- 
lipps, one of Addison's friends, who waited for him with 
a birch. Pope, who dared not risk a physical encounter, 
^ See chapter on Pope, p. 196. 



JOSEPH ADDISON 187 

shook his fist at Button's and laid up another grudge 
against King Addison. 

The next incident precipitated the quarrel. In 1715 
the first volume of Pope's Homer came out, and at the 
same time a version by Tickell, one of Addison's friends. 
To Pope, eagerly jealous, the case was plain : Tickell's 
version was much too good to be his alone — Addison 
must have helped him ; the same Addison, further- 
more, had ungraciously declined his defense of Cato^ 
and had advised him not to recast the Rape of the 
Lock ; Addison, it was clear, feared an able rival, even 
employed that birch-bearing bully, Phillipps ; Addison, 
it was certain, had written the rival translation of 
Homer and published it under Tickell's name, that the 
defeat of Pope might be the more ignominious. 

The breach was now complete. Addison bore himself 
throughout the whole affair with gentlemanly calmness, 
tinged perhaps by just a little too much self-sufficiency, 
a withheld derision, a* barely perceptible curl of the 
lip that was more intolerable than a scornful reply. 
Pope's behavior, as has been indicated, was spiteful, 
unfairly suspicious, and often vicious. He saw straight 
enough, however, to produce one of the cleverest sat- 
ires in the language. It is perhaps overdone ; Addison's 
unusual generosity and fundamental sincerity are not 
given due credit. It is well to remember, on the other 
hand, that Pope credits Addison with many of his most 
characteristic virtues, — 

" One whose fires 
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires, 
Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to write, converse, and live with ease " — 



188 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

before he begins bis terrible arraignment.^ And 
though Pope by no means draws the whole of Addison, 
what he does draw is near enough to hit home. Did 
not the great man " just hint a fault and hesitate dis- 
like " ? Was this not his power ? Was he not per- 
haps sometimes " so obliging that he ne'er obliged " ? 
" I sent the verses to Mr. Addison," says Pope,^ " and 
he used me very civilly ever after." Thackeray adds : 
"No wonder he did. It was shame very likely more 
than fear that silenced him. . . . His great figure 
looks out on us from the past — stainless but for that 
— pale, calm, and beautiful ; it bleeds from that black 
wound." 

The quarrel with Steele, in no way so serious or 
protracted as that with Pope, is of importance chiefly 
because Addison and Dick Steele had been friends 
since Charter House da3^s. But once manhood was 
reached, there was very little except the pen in common 
between them. Addison developed by easy degrees into 
political prominence and dignity : Steele, impetuous, 
rushing from one pursuit to another, found himself at 
forty in no political prominence except a kind of noto- 
riety that attached to rabid Whiggism. Addison was 
too judicial in his nature for Steele ; Steele was too in- 
judicious for Addison. It was hardly remarkable, then, 
that two things should have precipitated the quarrel 
between men who were drawing thus naturally apart. 
Addison had frequently lent Steele money, and had 
been, felt Sir Richard, who took little thought for the 
morrow, just a suggestion cold-blooded and severe in 
exacting payment. In the second place, Addison raised 

1 See an admirable essay by Mr. G. K. Chesterton on " Pope and the 
Art of Satire," in Varied Types. 

2 The verses were not published till 1723. 



JOSEPH ADDISON 189 

Tickell, a young man of thirty, to the position of Under 
Secretary of State, while Steele, the friend of his boy- 
hood, the editor of the Tatler and Spectator, and a 
Member of Parliament, was left in the cold. When the 
famous bill for limiting the number of peers was 
brought in, therefore, it was not unnatural that Steele 
should defend the Opposition against Addison and the 
Ministers. Steele's weapon was a paper called the 
Plebeian; Addison replied in the Old Whig. Macatday 
has pointed out that Steele, however he blundered 
upon the truth, was illogical in his arguments, and that 
Addison, however unsound his premises, by logical 
argument and superior style easily defeated the Ple- 
beian. There is no evidence that the friends of a life- 
time, who thus quarreled almost at the grave, were 
ever reconciled. 

In 1716 Addison, after along courtship, married the 
Countess Dowager of Warwick. His married life, which 
lasted only three years, does not seem to have been par- 
ticularly happy. Perhaps the most significant feature of 
the union was Addison's removal to the Countess' home, 
Holland House, " a house," says Macaulay, " which can 
boast of a greater number of inmates distinguished in 
political and literary history than any other private 
dwelling in England." 

Soon after moving to Holland House, Addison was 
forced by recurring attacks of asthma to abandon his 
work, political and literary. He declined quietly from 
now on, and, with many unaccomplished literary pro- 
jects before him, died, as serenely as he had lived, on 
June 17, 1719. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

Addison's last hours were characteristic of his whole 
life. It is said that just before he died he sent to ask 



190 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Gay's pardon for some offense of which Gay knew not. 
We regret that Pope and Steele could not also have been 
summoned to that bedside, not only to receive his for- 
giveness, but also to hear his last remark to his disso- 
lute stepson, the Earl of Warwick, " See how a Chris- 
tian can die." Pope would probably have gone off and 
written a satire on the words ; and one does feel that 
Addison was exasperatingly sure of himself even in 
death: his unbroken successes, even his immortality, 
came as easily to him as eating his dinner. At bottom, 
however, he was a great and good man ; his faults grow 
very little in the light of his learning, his refinement, 
his sanity, his genuineness, and his generosity. He was 
above party strife. He was the ablest prose writer of his 
time ; he stands, in fact, preeminent with two or three 
others in the whole history of English literature. Among 
the intellects of the day he had only one peer — Swift. 
Above all, he " reconciled wit and virtue," one of the 
most important contributions to morality in the eigh- 
teenth century. 



ALEXANDER POPE 

Pope held a unique position in the age of Queen Anne. 
Most of the great writers at that time depended for 
their eminence as much on the favor of Church or State 
as on their literary merits. Addison, for instance, was 
Secretary for Ireland and later Secretary of State ; Swift 
was as much the Dean of St. Patrick's as the author 
of Gulliver ; Steele was a member of Parliament, Prior 
was an ambassador, and Gay depended on a patron. 
Much of this favor, it is true, was the reward of literary 
excellence ; the success and the preferment, however, 
went hand-in-hand. Pope, on the other hand, in the face 
of physical deformities and religious ostracism, fought 
his way purely by his pen to the first place among con- 
temporary poets. He perfected the heroic couplet, and 
he gave serious dignity to letters as a calling. So great 
was he, in fact, that poets unquestioningly made him 
their model for a half century ; his influence extended 
into the very heart of the reaction against him and his 
school. His life will be found interesting as it touches 
the lives of his great contemporaries, as it develops a 
character that was a strange mixture of petty vanities 
and high purpose, of bitter jealousy and genuine tender- 
heartedness ; but it must be chiefly kept in mind that 
Pope was, from the age of twelve to his grave, pecul- 
iarly, professionally a man of letters. 

Alexander Pope was born of Roman Catholic parents 
on May 21, 1688, in Lombard Street, London. His 
father, of the same Christian name, acquired as a linen 



192 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

merchant a fortune sufficiently great to enable him to 
retire, when Pope was still a small child, to Binfield. 
on the border of Windsor Forest. His mother, whose 
maiden name was Edith Turner, — of good Yorkshire 
stock, — lived to the great age of ninety-three. The 
lasting aftection of the son for his mother is a refreshing 
contrast to the quarrels and petty deceits that checkered 
his whole life. 

Two things withheld from Pope the education com- 
mon to English boys. The " glorious Revolution " of 
1688, in the first place, brought Catholics into disfavor, 
frequently into persecution. Besides this, Pope was de- 
formed. It was only by patient nursing and constant 
attendance throughout his life that soul and body — 
his " crazy carcase," as AVycherley called it — were kept 
together. He did attend three schools, between the ages 
of eight and twelve, but most of his schooling came 
through the help of a family priest and his own eager- 
ness to learn. He himself told Spence that he had 
taught himself " Latin, as well as French and Greek." 
The result was a very defective scholarship, but a use- 
ful familiarity with Homer, Virgil, Statins, Horace, and 
Ovid. 

Pope has been considered, largely on his own sus- 
picious testimony, one of the great examples of poetic 
precocity. On his own authority he versified almost 
from the cradle. Adopting the phrase from Ovid, he 
said : — 

♦' As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
I lisp'd ill numbers, for the numbers came." 

He submitted his verses for correction to his father, 
who, when not satisfied, returned them with the com- 
ment, " These are not good rhymes." But the young 




ALEXANDER POPE 

From the portrait by Jonathan Richardson in 1732 



ALEXANDER POPE 193 

poet persevered. The Ode on Solitude^ said to have 
been written at the age of twelve, does not merit the 
parent's criticism. Many other juvenile pieces — chiefly 
imitations or translations — developed the style of 
which Pope found himself master at twenty-three. His 
greatest youthful effort was an epic poem of about 4000 
lines on Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. This long work 
was perhaps fortunately left uncompleted and was later 
burned by Pope himself. 

Pope's boyhood, then, little as it saw of the pastimes 
and comradeship that go to the development of most 
Englishmen, prepared him peculiarly for his life-work. 
As he sat, book in hand, in Windsor Forest, or spent 
long afternoons fumbling the pages of Virgil or Horace, 
and sometimes Spenser and Milton, in his father's li- 
brary, his life centred itself on the one thing he knew. 
He had few friends ; how he must have loved his books ! 
And as he translated and imitated, himself occasionally 
striking off a deathless phrase, how he must have warmed 
to his poetry, rejoiced in the feeling that day by day 
crept over him, — " I, too, am a poet ! " 

This desire to write verse, moreover, was no idle 
fancy of youth, but a conviction borne out by the 
praise of great men. As early as 1706 William Walsh 
had advised him to make correctness his aim ; "we 
have had great poets," said Walsh, " but never one great 
poet that was correct." The Pastorals, though not pub- 
lished till 1709, were largely written when Pope was 
sixteen, and Wycherley, a writer of plays and relic of 
the Restoration, so admired them that he at once formed 
an intimate friendship with the young author. On their 
publication the Pastorals brought Pope great popular- 
ity. However artificial, they were " correct," and that 



194 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

to an Augustan meant much. It is significant that Pope, 
at the age of twenty-one, took his place among great 
wits like Addison, Steele, and Swift. 

At the same time that he stepped into literary promi- 
nence Pope began his quarr^s. He always moved in 
a bright circle of friends ; but he seemed unable long 
to avoid falling out with some one. Hardly any of his 
long poems arose without jealous dispute; and the 
Dunciad — one of his latest works and really the con- 
summation of his genius — rounded out a life of quar- 
rels by paying off in keen satire the accumulated scores 
of years. 

Much of Pope's irritability and petty wrangling may 
be traced directly to his deformity; he was the victim 
of both physical and mental disease. At times suffering 
was intense ; he could work for only a few hours to- 
gether. Dr. Johnson thus describes him : " When he 
rose, he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, 
being scarcely able to hold himself erect till it was 
laced, and he then put on a flannel waistcoat. One 
side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he 
enlarged their bulk with three pair of stockings, which 
were drawn on and off by a maid." Dr. Johnson goes 
on, evidently with considerable fellow-feeling, to re- 
count how Pope was " too indulgent to his appetite." 
" If he sat down to a variety of dishes he would oppress 
his stomach to repletion." 

Closely connected with his physical weakness was a 
mental disease, probably fostered by his solitary youth. 
Pope was morbidly suspicious, often of his friends. He 
had so diligently hoarded and fingered his poetic store 
that he became bitterly jealous of rivalry, fearful of 
honest emulation. Under the influence of this malady he 



ALEXANDER POPE 195 

would stoop to almost any trick. By publishing con- 
cocted correspondence, by distorting facts, by spreading 
scandal, by slandering the innocent, he made in many 
ways a despicable figure among the great wits. He suc- 
cessively quarreled with Wycherley, Dennis, Addison, 
Tickell, Phillipps, Theobald, Gibber, and, finally, with 
Bolingbroke. 

Yet — in remarkable contrast — Pope was a great 
man in a circle of great men. Thackeray thus enumer- 
ates his closest friends : " Garth, the accomplished and 
benevolent, whom Steele has described so charmingly, 
of whom Codrington said that his character was 'all 
beauty,' and whom Pope himself called the best of 
Christians without knowing it ; Arbuthnot, one of the 
wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, gentlest of mankind; 
Bolingbroke, the Alcibiades of his age; the generous 
Oxford; the magnificent, the witty, the famous, and 
chivalrous Peterborough : these were the fast and faith- 
ful friends of Pope, the most brilliant company of 
friends, let us repeat, that the world has ever seen. The 
favorite recreation of his leisure hours was the society 
of painters, whose art he practiced. In his correspond- 
ence are letters between him and Jervas, whose pupil 
he loved to be — Kichardson, a celebrated artist of his 
time. . . — and the wonderful Kneller, who bragged 
more, spelt worse, and painted better than any artist 
of his day." In this list should be added Dean Swift, 
who, as his letters show, was one of the poet's firmest 
friends and greatest admirers. 

In spite of his deformity. Pope for a time longed to 
be a coffee-house swell. His first glimpse of the life 
was at an early age, when he was taken, in 1700, to 
see the great Mr. Dryden presiding over the wits at 



196 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Will's. Later, when the Pastorals had brought him 
fame, he went up to London and tried for a few years 
to live " about town." " For a brief space," says Thack- 
eray, " upon coming up to town, Pope formed part of 
King Joseph's ^ court, and was his rather too eager and 
obsequious humble servant. Dick Steele, the editor of 
the Tatler^ Mr. Addison's man, and his own man too, 
a person of no little figure in the world of letters, 
patronized the young poet and set him a task or two. 
Young Mr. Pope did the tasks very quickly and 
smartly. . . . He thought it an honor to be admitted 
into their company; to have the confidence of Mr. 
Addison's friend, Captain Steele." But the coffee-house 
life was soon too exacting for poor Pope's little body; 
he fortunately had the good sense to retire from the 
field, in favor of such vigorous trencher-men as Steele. 

Pope's quarrels began in his boyhood. In a long cor- 
respondence with Wycherley he soon perceived that he 
was wasting time " propping up an old rake," grew more 
severe in the correction of his senior's verses, and finally 
sent him certain insulting replies. A quarrel resulted. 
Whether the two ever became friends again is uncertain. 
Pope, as if to gain a quite unnecessary triumph, — for 
the death of the old dramatist was forlorn enough, — 
had the audacity to publish many years later an altered 
correspondence. " The first man of letters of his day," 
says Mr. Leslie Stephen, " could not bear to reveal the 
full degree in which he had fawned upon the decayed 
dramatist, whose inferiority to himself was now plainly 
acknowledged." 

The next quarrel was with one John Dennis, a pon- 

^ King- Joseph refers to Addison, who was the leader at Button's, 
opposite Will's. 



ALEXANDER POPE 197 

derous and somewhat vituperative writer of the old 
school. In 1711 Pope published his Essay on Criti- 
cism, in which he attacked Dennis in the character of 
Appius. Dennis had looked with disfavor, not unmixed 
perhaps with jealousy, on the Pastorals. He was easily 
enraged, then, by the following lines in the Essay : — 

" But Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
And stares, tremendous, with a threatening eye, 
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry." 

His savage reply, though it does make some good points, 
descends into personal abuse. After five not wholly un- 
fair criticisms, he goes on to insinuate that Pope is a 
" downright monkey " and a "hunch-backed toad." We 
shall meet Dennis again ; Pope, we shall see, never for- 
got injuries. 

Whatever his detractors had to say, the Essay on 
Criticism landed Pope, at the age of twenty-three, in 
the front ranks of living poets. The essay is, to be sure, 
little more than a succession of detached sayings, taken 
chiefly second-hand from the classics. Yet every one is 
familiar with such lines as — 

" A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 

and — 

" Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," 
and — 

" To err is human, to forgive, divine." 

The Rape of the Loch, in the following year, took 
London by storm, and Pope's position as first poet was 
secured. 

•In 1713 began Pope's quarrel with Addison, which 
lasted over several years and dragged in many other 



198 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

antagonists, whose names Pope duly remembered for 
entry in his last answer, the Dunciad. In the first 
place, Addison advised Pope not to recast The Rape 
of the Loch^ which was, he said, " a delicious little 
thing," as it stood. Pope, however, did change the 
poem and met with a huge success. He immediately 
inferred that Addison had been prompted by some 
mean motive ; he put himself on the defensive. The 
next step in the quarrel recalls the abusing and abused 
John Dennis. Pope had written a prologue for Addi- 
son's Cato. Dennis, in the spirit of blind revenge, 
attacked both play and prologue. Pope promptly re- 
plied anonymously in the Narrative of the Frenzy of 
J. D. — a satire as coarse and personal in style as 
Swift at his worst could have written. Addison, in his 
cold and irritatingly polished manner, disavowed all 
complicity, intimating to Pope that he was quite capa- 
ble of fighting his own battles. Pope, feeling that he 
had gone too far, and making matters worse by vain 
attempts to hide past errors by new slander, changed 
to the offensive. About this time he attacked the Pas- 
torals of one of Addison's friends, Ambrose Phillipps, 
" namby-pamby Phillipps," as Gay called him. Phil- 
lipps, who was a good swordsman, hung a birch behind 
the door of Button's Coffee-House, in readiness for 
Pope's appearance. Pope, who justly resented a physi- 
cal test as a reference to his deformity, grew more en- 
raged. Plotting underhand schemes, eyeing suspiciously 
anything connected with Addison, he continued the 
quarrel. It is not strange that Addison wrote to Lady 
Mary Wortley Montagu : " Leave Pope as soon as you 
can ; he will certainly play you some devilish trick 
else." On the whole, Addison treated Pope with gen- 



ALEXANDER POPE 199 

tlemanly calmness, though he does seem just a little too 
serene, too exasperatingly self-righteous. StiU his atti- 
tude shows most favorably in contrast to that of his 
snarling, spiteful antagonist. 

Pope's translation of Homer brought forth new 
strife. Tickell, a friend of Addison's, published in the 
same year as Pope, 1715, a translation of the first 
book. Addison, who naturally wished to support a 
friend and fellow Oxonian, praised Tickell's version, 
perhaps gave him a few suggestions. But Pope sus- 
pected him of having written it and published under 
his friend's name — that a mortal might seem to bring 
down an Olympian. Fortunately for Tickell, Pope's 
translation was universally preferred. It was shortly 
after this that Pope sketched Addison in the well- 
known lines on Atticus. Though they were not pub- 
lished till the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in 1735, Addi- 
son is said to have seen them, and to have generously 
complimented Pope on the characterization. 

Pope's Homer brought him, in eleven years, nearly 
.£9000, an almost unprecedented sum in those times. 
It has been praised by Addison, Swift, Gray, Gibbon, 
Dr. Johnson, and Byron. So popular was it throughout 
the century that Cowper's more accurate translation was 
barely recognized. Yet it has few Homeric qualities. 
Pope knew little Greek ; and one may be sure that he 
was more familiar with the French Homers of La Val- 
terie and Dacier and the English of Chapman, Hobbes, 
and Ogilby than with the original Greek. His mind 
was so wrapped up in himself that the poem, especially 
toward the end, grew more and more to be Pope, not 
Homer. As Bentley said to him, " It is a pretty poem, 
Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.''' 



200 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

With the money realized on his Homer, Pope 
moved, in 1718, to Twickenham, a small town on the 
Thames about half way between Windsor and London. 
Here he laid out his formal gardens, where — 

" Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother." 

As at Versailles, the gardening was geometrical — like 
the heroic couplet, like the Augustan life. In his villa 
Pope, now the recognized master-poet, sat in easy re- 
tirement, gathered his friends about him, wrote at his 
leisure, and planned new subterfuges and literary 
schemes. For all this, Pope had no great reputation for 
hospitality; indeed, Swift says he entertained stingily. 
There is a story of how, when he had two guests, " he 
would set a single pint upon the table ; and, having 
himself taken two small glasses, would retire and say, 
' Gentlemen, I leave you to your wine.' " Yet the great 
wits crowded around him at Twickenham, heard and 
praised his verses, and consulted his literary judgment. 
Bolingbroke, Bathurst, and Peterborough were among 
them. On the whole, it was the happiest time of Pope's 
life, and in it his best side is shown. There is an attrac- 
tive old-world atmosphere about those days. The cen- 
tral point of the Augustan age is Pope, with his flavor 
of Horace and Virgil, in his villa at Twickenham, with 
its artificial grotto and trim Louis XV gardens. 

So far only men have been spoken of in connection 
with Pope. Thackeray has pointed out how Pope was, 
like Addison and Swift, " a man's man." Besides his 
mother, only three women play any considerable part in 
the poet's life ; but his relations to them are so illustra- 
tive of certain characteristics that a short consideration 
is necessary. Before Pope had sought admittance to the 



ALEXANDER POPE 201 

fashionable life of London lie became acquainted with 
the Misses Teresa and Martha Blount. His regard seems 
to have been chiefly for the second sister, but to both 
he showed throughout his life gTeat friendship and un- 
seltish devotion. There have been various scandals about 
Pope's relations to these two ladies, but nothing has 
been proved, and the deformed little creature in the 
guise of a lover makes only a grotesque figure. The 
significant point is that, so far as we know, Pope showed 
no change in this aftectionate regard. And to Martha 
Blount he left the largest share of his personal property. 
But as Pope's dealings with men showed two Datiu'es, 
so his relations with the Blounts and his tender affection 
for his mother stand out in contrast to his attitude 
toward Lady Mary AVortley ^Montagu. This lady, one 
of the most accomplished and wittiest conversationalists 
and correspondents of the age, excited at first consid- 
erable admiration in Pope. She even allowed him to 
address her in the manner of a lover in the correspond- 
ence between them when she was with her husband at 
Constantinople. But Lady Mary was altogether too 
energetic a person and Pope too jealous of success 
to avoid occasional tiffs. These gTew to quarrels, and 
then to hatred. "When the two dined at Lord Oxford's 
table, one of them, it is said, frequently left the table in 
a rage. Pope made some insulting remarks and Lady 
^Liry replied much too vigorously. The upshot was that 
the satirist had one more name for caricature, and that 
Lady ^Mary's phrase descriptive of Pope, the " wicked 
wasp of Twickenham." became immortal. 

Thackeray advises his readers to pass over Pope's 
letters to women ; '• in which there is a tone of not 
pleasant gallantry, and, amidst a profusion of compli- 



202 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ments and politeness, a something which makes one 
distrust the little pert, prurient bard. There is very- 
little indeed to say about his loves, and that little not 
edifying. He wrote flames and raptures and elaborate 
verse to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ; but that pas- 
sion probably came to a climax in an impertinence and 
was extinguished by a box on the ear, or some such 
rebuff, and he began on a sudden to hate her with a 
fervor much more genuine than that of his love had 
been. It was a feeble puny grimace of love, and palter- 
ing with passion. After Mr. Pope had sent off one of 
his fine compositions to Lady Mary, he made a second 
draft from the rough copy, and favored some other 
friend with it. ... A gentleman who writes letters a 
deuxfins^ and after having poured out his heart to the 
beloved, serves up the same dish rechauffe, to a friend, 
is not very much in earnest about his loves, however 
much he may be in his piques and vanities when his 
impertinence gets its due." 

It is refreshing to contemplate, after these bickerings 
and disputes, the quiet life at Twickenham and the 
enduring affection between mother and son. " When 
Pope," as Thackeray says, " in a fever of victory, and 
genius, and hope, and anger, was struggling through 
the crowd of shouting friends and furious detractors 
to his temple of Fame, his old mother writes from the 
country, ' My deare ... I hope to hear from you and 
that you are well, which is my daily prayer ; and this 
with my blessing.' The triumph marches by, and the car 
of the young conqueror, the hero of a hundred brilliant 
victories : the fond mother sits in the quiet cottage at 
home and says, 'I send you my daily prayers, and I 
bless you, my deare.' " Pope's father having died in 



ALEXANDER POPE 203 

1717, she came to Twickenham, where she lived almost 
as long as her son, being mourned by him in 1733 with 
genuine affection. 

The life at Twickenham developed much of Pope's 
best work, the chief example of which is the Essay on 
Man. As early as 1723 he had become fast friends 
with Bolingbroke. Flattery was mutual, and between 
them one of the few works of Pope which did not arise 
from a quarrel was produced. In 1733-34 the Essay 
was published. Bolingbroke, who dabbled in philoso- 
phy, supplied most of the material, and Pope versified it. 
The Essay is in no way a sustained, coherent theory, 
but rather, like the poet's other work, a succession of 
clever maxims ; it does not, as it professes — 

" Vindicate the ways of God to man." 

But, though few read it, every one knows lines which 
have become familiar quotations, such as — 

" Hope springs eternal in the human breast; 
Man never is, but always to be, blest." 

and — 

"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; 
The proper study of mankind is man." 

Although it began in friendship, the Essay on Man 
brought forth quarrel. It had now become difficult for 
Pope to speak without exciting detractors. The Essay 
was attacked on the score of pantheism and deism. Poor 
Pope, who had after all only very general ideas of phi- 
losophy, took refuge behind a burly divine, one WiUiam 
Warburton. Bolingbroke, who called the new champion 
" the most impudent man living," never quite forgave 
Pope ; and though both Bolingbroke and Warburton 



204 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

mourned at his bedside, they fell to quarrehng over his 
grave. 

The work, however, which is most truly and compre- 
hensively illustrative of Pope's character is the Dun- 
dad. No poem so completely epitomizes the life of a 
man who " scarcely drank tea without a stratagem." It 
bears, one must admit, the marks of Swift's coarse wit 
and Warburton's " elephantine pleasantry." The Rape 
of the Lock is perhaps the ablest of Pope's poems; 
Eloisa to Ahelard shows more genuine emotion than 
any other ; the Essay on Man is more replete with 
quotable lines. But no poem so fitly as the Dunciad 
expresses the two sides of Pope's nature — the pain- 
fully nurtured grudge and the genuine scorn for petty 
Grub-Street wit. 

The Dunciad has a long history. In the last years 
of Queen Anne, Pope belonged to Swift's " little Sen- 
ate," of which the chief members, after Swift and Pope, 
were Atterbury, Arbuthnot, Gay, and Parnell. They 
projected, among other things, the " Scriblerus Club," 
in which the life and works of one Martinus Scriblerus, 
an imaginary person, were to form a satire on dullness. 
The Club never came into actual existence, but it in- 
spired Swift, with his terrible crushing satire, and Pope, 
with his nimble execution, to begin the work. Ulti- 
mately Pope did most of the labor, but the revengeful 
spirit of Swift is ever at his elbow as he writes. Theo- 
bald, a mild and ponderous critic, who had found just 
fault with Pope's edition of Shakespeare, was made 
Chief Dunce. Around him were grouped the scribblers 
whom Pope hated as a class, and others against whom 
he bore private malice. Taine describes them thus viv- 
idly : " In fact, all the filth of literary life is here ; and 



ALEXANDER POPE 205 

heaven knows what it then was ! In no age were hack 
writers so beggarly and so vile. Poor fellows, like Kich- 
ard Savage, who slept during one winter in the open 
air on the cinders of a glass manufactory, lived on what 
he received for a dedication, knew the inside of a prison, 
rarely dined, and drank at the expense of his friends ; 
pamphleteers like Tutchin, who was soundly whipped ; 
plagiarists like Ward, exposed in the pillory and pelted 
with rotten eggs and apples ; courtesans like Eliza Hey- 
wood, notorious by the shamelessness of their public 
confessions ; bought journalists, hired slanderers, ven- 
ders of scandal and insults, half rogues, complete roy- 
sterers, and all the literary vermin which haunted the 
gambling-houses, the stews, the gin-cellars, and at a sig- 
nal stung honest folk for a crownpiece. These villanies, 
this foul linen, the greasy coat six years old, the musty 
pudding, and the rest, are to be found in Pope as in 
Hogarth, with English coarseness and precision." In 
the second book Dulness with her court descends — 

*' To where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams 
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames. 

Here strip, my children, here at once leap in, 

Here prove who best can dash through thick and thin." 

The Dunciad first appeared in 1728, but a revised 
and amplified edition came out in 1743. In this Theo- 
bald was dethroned and CoUey Gibber, the poet-laureate, 
was installed as Chief Dunce. To satisfy a grudge Pope 
thus spoiled the congruity of the book ; for Gibber, 
however much a representative of vice and folly, was, 
as Mr. Stephen points out, " as little of a dullard as 
Pope himself." Gibber, it seems, had ridiculed Pope in 
the Rehearsal, and, despite Pope's wrath, had protested, 



206 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

in great good lirnnor, his intention so to continue. In 
the ensuing quarrel Gibber kept his temper irritatingly 
well ; and Pope indeed pretended to take the offense 
lightly. When the two Richardsons one day visited 
him, they found him reading one of Gibber's pamphlets. 
" These things are my diversion," he said ; but as he 
read, they perceived his features "writhing with an- 
guish." And when they left, the younger Richardson 
told his father that he prayed he might be spared such 
diversions as he had that day seen Pope enjoy. 

The Dunciad brought forth a long succession of at- 
tacks and bitter pamphlets. Pope usually dodged the 
issue or protected himself behind the portly person of 
Warburton. The general effect of the book, however, 
was a wholesome rebuke to the crowd of scribblers. 
Most men have long forgotten the names of Pope's vic- 
tims, and nearly all have ceased to read the coarse and 
abusive language that makes the poem at once a ter- 
rible and a revolting invective; but in the final lines — 
the genuine declaration of war against dullness and de- 
ceit, in a satirical apostrophe to Ghaos — Pope reaches 
a height nowhere else attained by him : — 

" Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored, 
Light dies before thy uucreating word; 
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, 
And universal darkness buries all." 

When Dr. Johnson was told that Pope himself so much 
admired these lines that his voice failed him in repeat- 
ing them, he replied, " And well it might, sir, for they 
are noble lines." 

Pope lived only about a year after the final form of 
the Dunoiad appeared. It seems as if the last years of 
a man who had gained such universal distinction might 



ALEXANDER POPE 207 

have been spent more nobly than in bickering with 
venal publishers. But Pope had become inextricably 
entangled in his petty subterfuges ; his only way out, 
he thought, was to cover his tracks by new deceits. It 
was in the years between 1730 and 1740, while the Es- 
say on Man and the Dunciad were maturing, while 
he was amusing himself with the Epistles and Satires, 
that Pope undertook to publish his correspondence. In 
it he appears in a very favorable light, and for some 
time critics believed it to be an honest biography ; but 
it is now generally known that Pope not only falsified 
by omission, but, far worse, by addition. The better to 
cover his tracks, he induced one Curll^a piratical book- 
seller, to steal the altered correspondence with Wych- 
erley from the library of Lord Oxford, where it had 
been conspicuously placed. Then, however. Pope grew 
uneasy until he could secure all outstanding correspond- 
ence which might incriminate him. Curll became sus- 
picious, and published certain letters without Pope's 
authority, as well as notes which Pope could not deny. 
A scheme to publish most of the real correspondence, 
a step which would have proclaimed Curll a humbug, 
was then hit upon by Pope. To do this he descended 
even to deceiving his old friend Swift, who was now 
sinking into mental feebleness. Altogether, Pope made 
a bad business of the whole affair, and at the same 
time acquired, in the eyes of posterity, the name of an 
habitual swindler. 

In strange contrast to his wrangling with Curll, 
Pope's last hours were comfortable and happy. As his 
friends gathered about his bedside, his truer, gentler 
nature rose ; he forgot all the petty animosities of his 
life. Once he cried, " What 's that ? " pointing to the 



208 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

air, and then with a gentle smile added, "'Twas a 
vision." Bolingbroke said touchingly, " I have known 
him these thirty years, and value myself more for that 
man's love than — " and his voice broke down. In his 
last days Pope always had a kind word for his friends; 
in Spence's comment, " as if his humanity had outlasted 
his understanding." And it is pleasant to think that 
the man who was never known in his life to laugh 
smiled cheerfully on his deathbed. He died quietly on 
May 30, 1744. 

In a concluding estimate of Pope one is confronted 
by the conflicting elements that made up his whole life. 
For at the same time that one feels contempt for his 
littlenesses, his deceit, his silly vanities, one's admiration 
is excited by his occasional genuineness, one's respect 
by the consecration of his life, in spite of almost over- 
whelming obstacles, to a literary ideal, and one's sym- 
pathy by the tender-hearted affection which, after all, 
was the deepest quality in his character. His love and 
hate, like his little crooked body, were frail, spasmodic. 
Where Addison had been displeased, and Swift com- 
pletely, crushingly angry. Pope would have been only 
peevish. And his love — a passing mood — lacked, by 
the same comparison, the serenity of Addison's and the 
consuming fire of Swift's. Yet for all this, Pope's is 
a permanent personality ; in no other man is the truest 
and most characteristic worth of the Augustan Age so 
completely revealed. 

One must not fail, furthermore, always to think of 
Pope as a writer. No less a man than Dr. Johnson, 
told Boswell that " a thousand years may elapse be- 
fore there shall appear another man with a power of 
versification equal to that of Pope." But, more than 



ALEXANDER POPE 209 

Lis technical skill, Pope did a lasting service to liter- 
ature as an art. " The master passion in his breast," 
concludes A. W. Ward, in his preface to the Cam- 
bridge edition of Pope, " was not his vanity ; it was his 
veneration for what is great and noble in intellectual 
life, and his loathing for what is small and mean and 
noxious. He could not exterminate Grub Street; but 
as long as he lived and battled against it, it felt that it 
was only Grub Street, and the world around was con- 
scious of the fact. He served literature neither for 
power, like Swift ; nor, like nearly all his contempo- 
raries, for place and pay ; not even for fame chiefly, 
but for her own sake." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784 

No critic has been more alive to the importance of 
biography than Samuel Johnson ; his Lives of the Poets 
show him at his best, and he always took pains to collect 
from competent authority details about the personality 
of the author with whom he was dealing. In return, 
Fate has given Johnson himself the best biography that 
ever was written. Moreover, this same biography has 
furnished the material and the inspiration for a life of 
Johnson which is unrivaled in its vivid descriptions 
of the man and of his times. Every schoolboy reads 
Macaulay and should look forward to the reading of 
Boswell. 

Samuel Johnson as a representative man of letters 
is a supremely good example of character outlasting 
performance. Even more than in Macaulay's day his 
actual work as a writer has fallen into neglect. His 
dictionary has long been out of date ; the moral essays 
of the Ramhler, once so widely read and imitated, 
are unknown even to the most general reader. A few 
of his Lives of the Poets have been edited and praised, 
but they would probably not have been edited or praised 
save for a desire to rescue at least something of the 
great man's work from oblivion, and vindicate his place 
in the world of letters. The modern editor of Shake- 
speare sneers at Johnson's notes, and suppresses, often 
with injustice, Johnson's comments on character and 
plot. Even Rasselas, a piece of allegorical fiction once 
thought supremely good, is unread. But his personality, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 211 

his actual sayings and doings, remain as fresh as ever, 
as well on account of the personality itself as of the 
vivid biography which describes it. 

Johnson was born at Lichfield, a somewhat sleepy 
old market and cathedral town, on September 18, 1709. 
His father, Michael Johnson, a fair scholar and at one 
time a man of considerable means, who held the office 
of churchwarden and even of sheriff, though the close of 
his life was darkened by loss of property, was a book- 
seller and stationer. From him the son inherited not 
only a sturdy frame and a mind of unusual strength, 
but also " that vile melancholy " which colored his 
whole life, fostered his indolence, and by natural reaction 
drove him into the social habits of which he was so fond. 
Unwilling to write except under the pressure of necessity, 
Johnson was always ready to talk ; but for this melan- 
choly which made him fear solitude, the world would 
have had more of his composition and less of his con- 
versation and would probably now know little or nothing 
about him. Johnson's mother was "a woman of distin- 
guished understanding," and it may well be that the 
piety which was so marked in Samuel was due to her 
precept and example. Tales of his childhood, partly from 
his own recollection and partly from that of his friends, 
are plentiful. He developed when very young extraor- 
dinary powers of memory, learning by heart a Collect 
from the Prayer-Book while his mother was going up 
one flight of stairs. He was taken to London, one 
of the last instances of a very old superstition, to be 
" touched " for the King's Evil, or scrofula ; and he 
had " a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds 
and a long black hood," that is, of Queen Anne, whose 
touch unfortunately failed to effect a cure. In the dame 



212 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

school he was the best scholar his teacher ever had. 
Next he was under the master in English whom he after- 
wards called Tom Brown, author of a spelling-book 
"dedicated to the Universe;" and then for two years 
learned Latin with Mr. Hawkins, under-master of Lich- 
field school. The head-master, Mr. Hunter, made a bad 
impression upon Johnson, using the rod on all occasions 
and inspiring this characteristic comment : " Now, sir, 
if a boy could answer every question, there would be 
no need of a master to teach him." Yet on another 
occasion Johnson accounted for his knowledge of Latin 
by saying, " My master whipped me very well. Without 
that, sir, I should have done nothing." He was a big 
climisy boy, best scholar in his school, but without ca- 
pacity and liking for games of any kind. He was an 
enormous reader. In 1763 he said to BosweU, " Sir, 
in my early years I read very hard ; it is a sad reflection 
but a true one that I knew almost as much at eighteen 
as I do now." 

At fifteen he was sent to a school in Worcestershire, 
staying there a year, and then seems to have spent two 
years at home in comparative idleness ; but his father's 
bookshop was a school in itself. In an irregular man- 
ner, he says, he " looked into a great many books which 
were not commonly known at the Universities." Even 
a provincial collection such as Michael Johnson kept 
for sale differed absolutely from the corresponding mass 
of fiction and other popular reading with which we are 
now familiar. Learned works of all kinds, translations 
from the classics and foreign languages, essays and 
treatises in theology, passed under his eyes in those 
two years, and, thanks to his amazing memory, helped 
to make him in after years one of the best-read men of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 213 

his time. In October, 1728, he went to Oxford. While 
at college he translated Pope's Messiah into Latin 
verse, which was printed in a miscellany published at 
Oxford in 1731. During one of his vacations he suf- 
fered from a violent attack of melancholy and wrote 
out in Latin for his physician a careful statement of 
his case. About this time, too, he began, by his own 
statement, to think in earnest of religion, largely im- 
pelled by the famous book. Law's Serious Call to a 
Holy Life; for the rest of his days he was an un- 
usually pious man. On the whole, his college life was 
irregular and unsatisfactory. As Boswell says, he was 
" depressed by poverty and irritated by disease." Pop- 
ular with his fellow-students, he seemed to one of the 
tutors " a gay and frolicsome fellow," but his comment 
on this statement probably tells the truth, "Ah, sir, 
I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they 
mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought 
to fight my way by my literature and wit ; so I disre- 
garded aU power and all authority." 

In the autumn of 1731 he ceased to be a member of 
the college, leaving it without a degree ; as a matter 
of fact, he was in actual residence there for little over 
a year. After December, 1729, he visited his University 
several times, but was not in permanent residence. He 
is reported to have told the tutor who fined him for 
absence: "Sir, you have sconced me two pence for 
non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny." At 
another time he excused himself by saying that he had 
been sliding on the ice in Christ Church meadow. The 
friend in whom he had trusted for support had deceived 
him; he was in debt, and his father, already bankrupt, 
died in December of the same year. Twenty pounds 



214 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

was all that he received from the sale of his father's 
effects, and he was forced to find immediate means of 
support. He was employed as usher in a Leicestershire 
school, but left it after a few months of very irksome 
employment. Next he went to Birmingham and tried 
for the first time that work as bookseller's hack to 
which so much of his life was devoted. For five guineas 
he translated a book of travels from the French, and 
Boswell sees even in his translation that ponderous and 
balanced style which is best known as Johnsonian. But 
he was not yet to plunge into the struggles of Grub 
Street. Matrimony and school-teaching were both in 
his mind. He married, July 9, 1735, Mrs. Porter, a 
woman nearly twice his age, with a grown daughter. 
Miss Porter's picture of her new stepfather is striking 
enough. ..." Lean and lank," she says, an " immense 
structure of bones, the scars of scrofula deeply visible." 
She mentions, too, those " convulsive starts and odd 
gesticulations " recorded so often of Johnson in his later 
days. Miss Porter's account, however, should be offset 
by a remark of Sir Joshua Reynolds and a description 
by Mrs. Thrale, friends of his later life, the former 
remarking that Johnson's limbs were well formed, and 
the latter describing his features as " strongly marked, 
and his countenance particularly rugged ... his sight 
was near, and otherwise imperfect ; yet his eyes, though 
of a light gray color, were so wild, so piercing, and at 
times so fierce, that fear was, I believe, the first emo- 
tion in the hearts of all his beholders." Tetty, or Tetsy, 
as Johnson called his wife, was described by Garrick, 
Johnson's pupil at the private academy which he now 
set up near Lichfield, probably with Mrs. Johnson's 
money, as very fat, " with swelled cheeks of a florid red, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 215 

produced by thick painting and increased by the liberal 
use of cordials ; flaring and fantastick in her dress, and 
affected both in her speech and her general behavior." 
A year and a half exhausted the possibilities of the 
school ; and having written part of his tragedy, Irene, 
he went up to London along with his pupil Garrick. 
He lodged near the Strand, and, as he says, " dined very 
well for eight-pence, with very good company, at the 
Pine-Apple in New Street just by." He himself accounts 
for the cheapness of this meal by the fact that he drank 
no wine ; and Dr. Hill, quoting Johnson's remark in 
1778 that in early life he drank wine, for many years 
drank none, then drank a great deal, had a severe ill- 
ness, left it off and never began again, calculates that 
he was an abstainer from about 1736 to 1757 and from 
1765 to the end of his life. He described himself in 
1757 as "a hardened and shameless tea-drinker." He was 
not without acquaintances, and was often entertained 
at the house of a gentleman named Hervey, of whom 
he afterwards said : " He was a vicious man, but very 
kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love 
him." Meanwhile, he wrote to his subsequent employer, 
Mr. Cave, the publisher of the Gentleman s Maga- 
zine, proposing to translate a history of the Council of 
Trent, and worked at his tragedy, finishing the latter 
during a summer visit to his wife at Lichfield, and 
returning with her to London in the autumn. Here he 
attempted in vain to have this tragedy put on the stage, 
but it was not accepted until Garrick, when manager 
of the Drury Lane Theatre, undertook to produce it. 
Steady employment, however, awaited him with Mr. 
Cave, for whose famous magazine Johnson acted not 
only as contributor, but as a kind of under-editor. He 



216 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

corrected and improved the various articles, and pre- 
pared, often with the slenderest material, reports of the 
debates in both Houses of Parliament. 

In May of 1738 appeared London — a Poem in 
Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. This satire 
had been paraphrased before by Boileau for Paris and 
by Oldham for London, but the force and keenness of 
Johnson's work are unsurpassed. Some of its most suc- 
cessful lines come from the very heart of his experi- 
ence, — 

" Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed." 

It was published by Dodsley without the author's name, 
and brought him but ten guineas. It made its way at 
once and reached a second edition within a week. Pope, 
on being told that the author's name was Johnson, an 
obscure man, remarked that he would soon be deterre, 
unearthed. He seems to have tried to put to practical 
account the praise which he received for this poem. Of- 
fers were made to set him at the head of a school if he 
could get the degree of Master of Arts ; and a friend 
applied, but in vain, for that favor from the University of 
Oxford. Pope recommended him to a nobleman for a de- 
gree from Dublin, but again without success. Johnson 
even thought of practicing as an advocate in civil law, 
but this attempt also failed, and he settled down to his 
work as the hack of Mr. Cave. This work was thor- 
oughly miscellaneous, short essays, biographies such as 
lives of the admirals Blake and Drake, translations from 
various languages, criticisms, proposals, and the like, 
along with the Parliamentary Debates, which he wrote 
i*p for about two years. It must be remembered that 
the orations quoted in these debates were very largely 
of his own composition. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 217 

His private life during these days lias been often de- 
scribed. His obscure lodgings, his precarious meals, not, 
however, to be confused with the subsistence of a mere 
tramp, eaten with voracious appetite and small regard 
for the customs of society, his poor and ill-fitting clothes, 
his friendship with genial vagabonds like Savage and 
Psalmanazar, his sturdy independence of patronage from 
the great, and his equally sturdy dealings with book- 
sellers, have been set again and again in sharpest relief. 
Always reasonable, indeed often far too moderate, in his 
charges for literary work, Johnson brooked no insolence 
in his employers, as in the case of Osborne. When Mrs. 
Thrale asked him about his altercation, he replied 
" There is nothing to tell, dearest lady, but that he 
was insolent, and I beat him, and that he was a block- 
head and told of it, which I should never have done. 
... I have beat many a fellow, but the rest had 
the wit to hold their tongues." To Boswell he was even 
more laconic. " Sir, he was impertinent to me and I 
beat him. But it was not in his shop ; it was in my own 
chamber." Years afterwards, when Macpherson pro- 
claimed that he would chastise Johnson for his attacks 
on the authenticity of Ossian and the good faith of its 
alleged translator, the old man procured an oak staff 
and said he was ready. In 1744 he wrote the life of 
Richard Savage, the remarkable adventurer who had 
died a year before in Bristol Prison, and with whom 
Johnson had often walked the streets of London in 
strange intimacy. With regard to his speed in compo- 
sition Johnson remarked that he wrote forty-eight oc- 
tavo printed pages of this book at a sitting, " but then," 
he says, " I sat up all night." It was while praising, 
and justly praising, this biography, that a guest of Mr. 



218 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Cave unwittingly delighted the anonymous author, who, 
too shabbily dressed to appear at the table, was eating 
his " plate of victuals " behind a screen. 

Meanwhile Johnson had achieved a very solid repu- 
tation, not only for this journalistic work but for his 
learning; and in 1747 sundry booksellers contracted 
with him to make a dictionary of the English language. 
The price was X1575, all of which and more had been 
paid to him by the time the work appeared. No one had 
ever before attempted to perform such a task alone; 
Johnson felt confident that he could do it in three years, 
but in the plan for his dictionary which he addressed 
to Lord Chesterfield the author confesses himself 
"frighted at its extent." He had six amanuenses and 
worked in a room " fitted up like a counting-house for 
the purpose." In 1749, while engaged on his large task, 
he published the Vanity of Human Wishes, imitated, 
like his London, from a satire of Juvenal. It had been 
written the preceding year at Mrs. Johnson's lodgings 
in the country. This poem, for all its satire, is less keen 
and piercing than London, and probably reflects the 
easier circumstances of the poet. Indeed, he was now 
realizing his old ambition, and the same year saw his 
tragedy of Irene put on the stage by David Garrick. 
It was not a great success, but it ran nine nights and 
is said to have brought its author something like X300. 
He appeared at the theatre on the first night of the play 
in the unwonted splendor of "a scarlet waistcoat, with 
rich gold lace, and a gold laced hat." He was no longer 
the mere bookseller's hack ; and in the next year, 1750, 
he began to publish his Rambler, a not altogether un- 
worthy successor of the Taller, Spectator, and Guard- 
ian, and in it he made good his claim as the foremost 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 219 

moral writer of his nation. No one, it is true, now reads 
these heavy philosophical disquisitions on the conduct 
of life ; but their authority and popularity in their own 
day and throughout the eighteenth century stand be- 
yond dispute. It ran from the 20th of March, 1750, ap- 
pearing every Tuesday and Friday, until March, 1752, 
and practically all the work was done by Johnson. But 
the real success of the Rambler was not as a periodical, 
but when revised and published in book form. The 
author himself " lived to see ten large editions of it in 
London alone." It was mainly through these essays 
that Johnson acquired his reputation as the chief up- 
holder of sound old English morality as well as of re- 
vealed religion. What his writings did in this respect 
he fortified by his conversation ; and when Boswell 
once asked him if the roughness of his manner had 
been an advantage or not, Johnson defended himself 
as follows ; " No, sir; I have done more good as I am ; 
obscenity and impiety have always been repressed in my 
company." At a time when the free-thinking, so-called, 
of France had become fashionable in certain English 
quarters, these vigorous and uncompromising utterances 
were doubly welcome to conservative England. Here, 
too Johnson's somewhat frigid style reached its most 
distinctive stage. One writer has hinted that as the 
making of the dictionary was going on while he wrote 
his Rambler^ he was tempted to use many far-fetched 
words in his essays. 

The practice of morality was as conspicuous in John- 
son's life as its theory. An outspoken foe of Milton the 
republican, he not only did justice to Milton's genius 
as a writer, but did all he could to make successful the 
acting of Comus at Drury Lane Theatre for the benefit 



220 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

of Milton's granddaughter, composing a prologue which 
was spoken by Garrick, and, as we should say, writing 
it up in the newspapers. In a letter to one of these 
newspapers he speaks of " our incomparable Milton," 
and begs its readers "to lay out a trifle" for the benefit 
of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster. 

Two years later Johnson had need in his own life 
for the sympathy of friends. On March 17, by the Old 
Style, or by the New, which went into ejffect in Septem- 
ber of the same year, March 28, Mrs. Johnson died.* 
Before his wife's death, however, Johnson had not only 
formed his varied and notable circle of friends, but had 
begun to gather about him those objects of his charity 
who seemed so strange to friends as well as foes. Mrs. 
Williams, old, blind, and poor, was already dependent 
on him ; and Levet, an obscure physician, a taciturn 
and grotesque figure, could boast of Johnson's friend- 
ship as well as of his bounty. No more sincere or touch- 
ing memorial verses exist in the English language than 
those which the great man wrote on Levet's death. 
Later came another poor lady, Mrs. Desmoulins, with 
her daughter, and yet one more inmate. Miss Carmi- 
chael. This menagerie, as Macaulay terms it, dependent 
on Johnson's charity, too often paid him with com- 
plaints and the racket of their own petty quarrels. Yet 
that charity was unwearied, and there is no finer trait 
in the testy and often bullying autocrat of letters and 
arbiter of morals than this tolerance in his own house- 
hold of baitings which the best of philanthropists would 
have found unbearable. It is true that Johnson could 

* " March 28, 1753. — I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty's 
death, ^ith prayer and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed 
for her conditionally, if it were lawful." 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 221 

always escape from his housemates to his friends. 
These friends represented all phases of London life. 
There was Reynolds the painter, afterwards Sir Joshua, 
most lovable of men, Bennet Langton, a country gentle- 
man whose learning and high moral character endeared 
him to his friend, and Topham Beauclerk, a dissipated 
but brilliant aristocrat, great-grandson of Charles II 
and Nell Gwyn. Instead of the earlier picture, Johnson 
and Savage, penniless both, pacing the streets of Lon- 
don all night for lack of a few pence to pay for lodging, 
one sees now Beauclerk and Langton knocking up 
Johnson at three in the morning in his chambers in the 
Temple. He appears in his shirt, a poker in his hand ; 
but recognizing his visitors cries out : " What, is it 
you, you dogs ? I '11 have a frisk with you ! " And so 
they sally out into Covent Garden and thence repair to 
a neighboring tavern. With Garrick, too, he maintains 
the old friendship ; in brief, it may be assumed that 
even now he knew most of the men who were worth 
knowing in the London of his day. 

At last the great work, the Dictionary, was done. 
Lord Chesterfield expected that the work would be ded- 
icated to him, and published some fine compliments 
to the author. These overtures were received with 
scarcely veiled contempt. " I have sailed," said Johnson 
to Garrick, " a long and painful voyage round the world 
of the English language ; and does he now send out two 
cock-boats to tow me into harbor ? " To the earl himself 
he wrote a letter which may pass as a kind of declaration 
of independence in English authorship. One sentence 
gives its purport : " Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who 
looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in 
the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers 



222 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

him with help ? " ^ Not content with this sturdy rebuff, 
Johnson made his celebrated epigram : " This man I 
thought had been a Lord among wits ; but I find he is 
only a wit among Lords." Rejecting the favor of noble 
patrons, the author of the Dictionary was nevertheless 
glad to welcome the degree of Master of Arts to grace 
its title-page, bestowed upon him by his own Univer- 
sity of Oxford. The great work was published in two 
folio volumes. Every one knows the anecdotes about 
his various indiscretions and mistakes. " Why did you 
de^e pastern as the 'knee of a horse'?" asked a lady. 
" Ignorance, Madam," answered the lexicographer, 
" pure ignorance." His definition of net-work should 
be reversed, as the word is needed to define its own 
definition. Tory, Whig, pension, oats, excise, are ex- 
amples of his prejudice, and the last-named nearly led 
to a lawsuit for libel from the Commissioner of Excise. 
Humor plays about his definition of lexicograjyher as 
"a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge." Defining 
lyich as " a corpse," and Lichfield as the " City of the 
Martyrs," he adds, " Salve magna parens " as a tribute 
to the place of his birth. 

From this time, though Johnson still had to work for 
his bread, he shrank more and more from drudgery 
of daily toil. He told Boswell that he always felt an 
inclination to do nothing. His constitutional indolence 
asserted itself, and necessity's sharp pinch was less keen 
than before. He laid himself open to the charge of dis- 
honor by issuing a proposal for a new edition of Shake- 
speare, to be finished in a short time. Though many 

^ This and the preceding' quotation are capital examples respectively 
of Johnson's style in his letters and conversation — essentially differ- 
ent from the labored and ponderous style of his formal writings. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 223 

subscriptions were paid in, Johnson failed to keep his 
promise ; it was not till nine years later, in 1765, that 
the edition appeared. Meanwhile many changes had oc- 
curred in his manner of life. He had issued a new series 
of essays called the Idler, appearing every Saturday 
in a weekly newspaper. These continued for two years, 
and out of the 103 numbers only twelve were contributed 
by Johnson's friends. During the course of these publi- 
cations his mother had died, and to defray the expense 
of the funeral as well as to pay off certain of her debts 
he wrote his famous story Rasselas. He " told Sir 
Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in the evenings of 
one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was written, 
and had never since read it over." The book was very 
popular in England and was translated into most of the 
modern languages. In 1762 George IH, whose opening 
reign was hailed on all sides with delight, bestowed on 
Johnson " as a very learned and good man " a pension 
of <£300 per year. This sum meant far more then than 
now, and it meant more to Johnson than to most men. 
Apparently, too, it set the seal on his indolence. On the 
other hand, it is urged that the rest so obtained was 
absolutely needed, that his mind had been " strained 
and over-labored," and that, in the words of Birkbeck 
Hill, " without this pension he would not have lived to 
write the second greatest of his works, the Lives of the 
Poets.'''' He let his definition oi pensioner remain as 
it stood, and his letter of thanks to the Earl of Bute 
made this characteristic statement : " You have con- 
ferred your favors on a man who has neither alliance 
nor interest, who has not merited them by services, 
nor courted them by officiousness ; you have spared him 
the shame of solicitation, and the anxiety of suspense." 



224 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

From the date of his pension the great writer becomes 
the great talker, and by a happy stroke of fortune in 
the first year of his leisure he was introduced to Boswell 
and thus secured the keenest observer, the most atten- 
tive listener, and the most devoted admirer who ever 
penned a biography. From their first meeting Boswell 
records several of Johnson's sayings, for example, " Der- 
rick may do very well, as long as he can outrun his 
character ; but the moment his character gets up with 
him, it is all over." 

Here is the Johnson whom the world knows and 
always will know, a man of pithy phrases, of blunt and 
often reckless but always telling criticism, of argument 
for argument's sake, and of opinions whose unvarying 
prejudice gives them a consistency better appreciated 
by present readers than by men of his own time. His 
reputation was of course tremendous ; his circle of 
friends included the greatest actor and the greatest ora- 
tor of English record — Garrick and Burke ; men su- 
preme in their own lines, like Reynolds and Gibbon ; 
and men of fashion and of authority, hardly remembered 
now, but formidable in their day. Yet in the club where 
these men gathered Johnson was easily the first, and 
all were content to listen when he spoke. The literary 
club, as Boswell calls it, was proposed by Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, and founded in 1764. They met once a week. 
New members were taken in, and in 1792 there were 
thirty-five upon the list, including half a dozen peers. 
In Johnson's time, however, it was a group of men allied 
by commanding, if varied talent ; and over these men 
the dictator of English letters held undisputed sway. 
No better illustration of his supremacy could be found 
than the famous Round Robin protesting against the 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 225 

use of Latin in the epitaph on their fellow-member, 
Dr. Goldsmith. Partly in jest, partly in earnest, this 
form of petition was used "so as not to let it be known 
who puts his name first or last to the paper." Burke 
framed the address and Sir Joshua carried it to John- 
son, who " received it with much good humor, and 
desired Sir Joshua to tell the gentlemen, that he would 
alter the epitaph in any manner they pleased, as to 
the sense of it ; but he would never consent to disgrace 
the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English in- 
scription.^^ Such was their awe of Johnson, and awe 
tempered by affection ruled even in their social meetings. 
Of these meetings Macaulay's description cannot be 
improved : — 

" The club-room is before us, and the table on which 
stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for John- 
son. There are assembled those heads which live for 
ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spec- 
tacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the 
courtly sneer of Beauclerk, and the beaming smile of 
Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snufp-box, and Sir Joshua 
with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that 
strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures 
of those among whom we have been brought up, the 
gigantic body, the huge massy face seamed with the 
scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted 
stockings, the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the 
dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. 
We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive 
twitches ; we see the heavy form rolling ; we hear it 
puffing ; and then comes the ' Why, sir ! ' and the 
'What then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You 
don't see your way through the question, sir ! ' " 



226 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Besides this club life, of which Johnson was so fond, 
there were other places where he was welcomed for his 
talk and forgiven for his manners. His later life was 
passed not only with this aristocracy of intellect, but to 
a great extent in a house of wealth and refinement. 
For more than a dozen years he lived on the most in- 
timate terms with the household of Mr. Thrale, a 
wealthy brewer, whose wife is described by the not 
too enthusiastic Boswell as " a lady of lively talents, 
improved by education." Indeed, Johnson came to call 
their comfortable house his home. Mr. Thrale himself 
had been educated at Oxford and not only appreciated 
but instigated the brilliant conversations in which 
the sage took part. Mrs. Thrale, in the anecdotes of 
Johnson published after her second marriage, says that 
" Dr. Johnson, commonly spending the week at our 
house, kept his numerous family in Fleet Street upon 
a settled allowance; but returned to them every Sat- 
urday to give them three good dinners and his company, 
before he came back to us on the Monday night." 
While it lasted, this friendship with the Thrales made 
his life happy ; the society of his other friends banished 
his cares ; and from other quarters, too, honors came 
thick and fast upon him. First Trinity College, Dublin, 
and then his own University, granted him the advanced 
degree. He was now indeed Doctor Johnson. The king 
himself desired to meet his distinguished subject, and 
the interview is carefully described by Boswell, from 
the doctor's own account. The monarch's compliment 
and Johnson's comment on it are well known. John- 
son said he " had already done his part as a writer. ' I 
should have thought so, too,' said the king, ' if you had 
not written so well.' " Johnson remarked to his friends 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 227 

that this was " decisive," and needed no reply. " When 
the king had said it, it was to be so. It was not for 
me to bandy civilities with my sovereign." 

During these years of his life, happy in spite of the 
melancholy and indolence with which he constantly re- 
proaches himself in his meditation and prayers, he lived 
either at the Thrales' or at his lodgings in London. 
Here about twelve o'clock a visitor would find him " in 
bed or declaiming over his tea ... he generally had 
a levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters . . . 
and sometimes learned ladies ... he declaimed all the 
morning, then went to dinner at a tavern, where he 
commonly stayed late, and then drank his tea at some 
friend's house, over which he loitered a great while but 
seldom took supper." Dr. Maxwell, who furnished this 
account to Boswell, goes on to say that Johnson must 
have read and written chiefly in the night ; and quotes 
Johnson's saying that Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
choly was the only book that ever took him out of bed 
two hours sooner than he wished to rise. 

As to his writing, his political pamphlets must have 
cost him little labor, and done nothing for his reputa- 
tion. That which he wrote against the Americans, Tax- 
ation no Tyranny^ published in 1775, is weak in its 
argument, and the vigor of its language fails to conceal 
the author's blind and unreasoning prejudice against the 
colonists. He revised his Dictionary and wrote small 
articles on various subjects, including legal opinions for 
Boswell. But conversation was his main employment 
until the persistence of Boswell and the solicitations of 
his old friends the booksellers led respectively to two of 
his major works, the Journey to the Western Islands 
of Scotland^ published in 1775, and the Lives of the 



228 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

English Poets, published as prefaces to the different 
volumes of the collection, four volumes appearing in 
1779 and the remaining six in 1781. Accompanied by 
Boswell, whom he met in Edinburgh about the middle 
of August, 1773, he crossed the Highland border and 
visited the remote and untraveled but hospitable islands 
of the Hebrides group, meeting there those feudal con- 
ditions of the clan and its chieftain which appealed so 
powerfully to his Tory prejudices. The return was 
made in November by way of Boswell's family place in 
Ayrshire. "I believe," says his biographer, "ninety- 
four days were never passed by any man in a more 
vigorous exertion;" and Johnson was now sixty-four 
years of age. Two years later he went with the Thrales 
to France, and one must echo Boswell's regret that the 
doctor did not write an account of his travels. A brief 
and unfinished journal records his impressions. Fond 
as he was of the city, he enjoyed traveling; even when 
sixty-nine years old he spent a week with Langton in 
the camp of the Lincolnshire militia. 

It was in spite of the state of his health, however, 
and not by reason of it, that Johnson made these expe- 
ditions. The concluding years of his life saw the vain 
struggle of his powerful constitution against insidious 
disease. The death of Mr. Thrale and the consequent 
breaking up of that pleasant home at Streatham made 
up a calamity which darkened in many ways the close 
of Johnson's life. Mrs. Thrale's affection for the old 
man weakened under the pressure of an attachment to 
Piozzi, an Italian music-master, whom she finally mar- 
ried; and though Johnson was afterwards her guest at 
Brighton, his parting prayer in the library at Streatham 
was really his farewell. This was in October, 1782. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 229 

The two remaining years of his life were spent in a 
struggle with complicated bodily disorders, borne with 
fortitude but sharpened by that overwhelming dread of 
death which he never concealed. His mind meanwhile 
remained as vigorous as ever, and there was no differ- 
ence in his powers of conversation except perhaps an 
increased severity of retort and epithet, due to phy- 
sical irritation. Doubtless, however, his love of little 
children remained to the end, as well as his kindness to 
his servants and his fondness for animals, which made 
him go out and buy oysters for his cat Hodge. In June, 
1783, he had a stroke of palsy and was deprived for a 
while of the powers of speech. It is interesting to note 
that in order to prove that his mind was spared he com- 
posed a prayer in Latin verse at the first onset of the 
attack. His recovery was prompt, and in December we 
find him forming a little dining club " to insure himself 
society in the evening for three days in the week." 
During this severe winter he was afflicted with dropsy, 
but continued to talk with his friends and to write his 
admirable letters. In February, 1784, he was very ill 
but again obtained partial relief. In May Boswell foimd 
him greatly recovered, and reports him as dining here 
and there "in fine spirits." Early in June he and Bos- 
well visited Oxford, staying a fortnight and even visit- 
ing country places in the neighborhood. 

He met his literary club for the last time on June 
22. In July he visited friends in Staffordshire and 
Derbyshire, hoping that travel would bring him re- 
lief. He spent some time in his native city of Lich- 
field ; though surrounded here by friends and conscious 
that death was no longer remote, he nevertheless yearned 
for the familiar ways of London, arriving there on 



230 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

November 16, 1784. His pains were now violent, but he 
beguiled his sleepless nights translating from Greek into 
Latin verse. Physicians of the highest rank attended 
him without fee, and friends like Burke and Langton 
were constant at his bedside. Informed that death was 
inevitable — " Then," said Johnson, " I wiU take no 
physick, not even my opiates ; for I have prayed that I 
may render up my soul to God unclouded." He died on 
the evening of Monday, the thirteenth of December, 
and was buried a week later in Westminster Abbey. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 

If singularity be a sign of genius, Goldsmith had his 
full share. His manners, his mirth, his vagabond ways, 
his tastes in dress — all were strikingly singular. He 
was, moreover, an important figure. He found his way, 
in spite of his odd manners and blundering speeches, 
into one of the most renowned literary circles of all 
time; he numbered among his friends such men as 
Burke, Reynolds, and Johnson ; and it is no small thing 
that the great lexicographer should have pronounced 
after his death, " He was a very great man." The hu- 
mor of his life is constantly bordering on pathos : in 
his squalor and incompetence and misfortune he figures 
in scene after scene that is almost wholly sad. Yet, like 
Garrick, one is frequently forced to laugh at his strange 
adventures and odd blunders. Still more, like Johnson, 
one is called to admire his genius. 

Oliver Goldsmith was born on November 10, 1728, 
in the village of Pallas, County Longford, Ireland. His 
father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, of a stock, says 
Washington Irving, well-known for its " kindliness and 
incompetency," its " virtue and poverty," scarcely man- 
aged to keep a roof over his family of eight children. In 
the generous and guileless Dr. Primrose in The Vicar 
of Wakefield and in the village parson of the Deserted 
Village ^ — " passing rich with forty pounds a year," 
whose " pity gave ere charity began " — Goldsmith had 
for models his own father and older brother Henry. 

When Oliver was a small child his father, presented 



232 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

with the living of Kilkenny West, worth about X200 
a year, moved to a farm of seventy acres on the borders 
of the village of Lissoy, County Westmeath. This was 
the scene of Oliver's boyhood, the model in all proba- 
bility for " Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain ; " 
though, as Macaulay points out, only Auburn's decay is 
Irish ; its prosperity is altogether English. 

Goldsmith's schooKng was picturesque rather than 
thorough ; it gave him a poor foundation for the scien- 
tific work he later professed, but it fed his imagination 
with a rare collection of pictures. At six he passed from 
the dame-school of Mistress Elizabeth Delap to the 
charge of the village schoolmaster, Thomas Byrne, com- 
monly known as Paddy, a retired quartermaster on half- 
pay. This man's knowledge of foreign lands, his stories 
of robbers and pirates and " the whole race of Irish 
rogues and rapparees," his ballad-making and his su- 
perstitious fairy-tales crowded out of his pupil most of 
the more prosaic knowledge generally acquired by boys ; 
under his influence young Oliver began to scribble 
verses ; and, whatever his inherited disposition to pov- 
erty and genius, the boy's love in later years of the 
"open road" was largely due to this ballad-making 
quartermaster, Paddy Byrne. 

Goldsmith, after an attack of the small-pox, which 
disfigured him for life, was put under the care of the 
Eev. Mr. Griffin, a schoolmaster of Elphin, in Ros- 
common. From here he passed, through the generosity 
of his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Contarine, who wished 
Oliver to have a university education, to more pre- 
tentious schools, first to one at Athlone, and two years 
later to one at Edgeworthstown. From the latter he 
went up in June, 1745, to Trinity College, Dublin. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 233 

One famous anecdote of his school-days shows perhaps 
better than anything Oliver's youthful characteristics — 
his love of adventure, his thriftlessness, and his gulli- 
bility. On returning home from Edgeworthstown he 
stopped at Ardagh and, intent on making a fine display 
with the one 'guinea he possessed, asked for the best 
house in the town. A wag named Kelly directed him 
to the private residence of a Mr. Featherstone, and the 
guileless Goldsmith rode forthwith thither, ordered his 
horse stabled, and made himself at home in the mansion. 
Mr. Featherstone, who knew Goldsmith's father, had 
good humor enough to conceal the youth's blunder from 
him and played the part of landlord to perfection. Gold- 
smith ordered wine, swaggered about the house — and 
the next morning discovered his mistake. All who know 
She Stoops to Conquer will recognize in this incident 
the origin of the plot. When we add to this happy-go- 
lucky character Goldsmith's generosity and simplicity, 
and remember his pock-marked face, his short, ungainly 
figure, and his passion for fantastically colored garments, 
we have a very fair picture of the man as he entered 
college — a man not too well fitted to pursue scholar- 
ship, but admirably equipped to turn his picturesque 
poverty and odd experiences to literary account. 

At college Goldsmith was at first forced, on account 
of his father's straitened circumstances, to take the po- 
sition of a sizar, an office in which the student performs 
certain kitchen duties in payment for board and tuition. 
Soon, however, the distinctive gown and the contempt 
of the more fortunate stung the proud and sensitive 
Goldsmith to the quick ; and after throwing a dish at 
one of the sneerers he was relieved of the menial task. 

His whole college career, as may be guessed, was 



234 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

picturesque rather than scholarly. His writings bear 
witness to his intelligence, and he did no doubt pick up 
much incidental knowledge by the academic way ; but 
his main path led to other things — boon companions 
and considerable indolence. " I was a lover of mirth 
from my childhood," he says. He was never vicious, — 
indeed quite too guileless for that, — but he loved dearly 
a good song at a tavern. It is not surprising, then, to 
see him soon in disgrace and setting out for America — 
half for the adventure, half to escape humiliation and 
poverty at home. In the first place, he had always quar- 
reled with his tutor, the Rev. Theaker Wilder, a stiff- 
necked mathematician. In 1 747 his father's death forced 
him to depend whoUy on his imcle Contarine. Added 
to this was the disgrace of public admonition for com- 
plicity in the riot of one Gallows Walsh, who proposed 
to break open the jail and free a fellow-student. He 
partly redeemed himself by winning a college prize, but 
while he was celebrating in his rooms with friends of 
both sexes, in burst the Rev. Wilder and the guests 
were turned incontinently forth. So, dreading the ridi- 
cule of his fellows and the severity of the authorities, 
but above all loving a rare adventure. Goldsmith 
straightway sold his books and started for Cork. It is 
not remarkable that he spent all but a shilling before 
he left Dublin. He was soon forced to return, and 
through his brother Henry, a man held in esteem as 
a scholar and clergyman, was reconciled to the college 
authorities. 

For two years longer Oliver continued at the Univer- 
sity and did creditable work in the classics. Against 
the mathematics he had a strong prejudice, born of 
association with the Rev. Wilder and of a natural 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 235 

inaptitude for anything exact. Yet even in the classics 
Goldsmith did not greatly shine, and of his college 
career such incidents as his expedition to Cork or his 
attempt to keep warm by covering himself with feath- 
ers from his bed, when he had given his blankets to a 
poor woman with five children, will be remembered 
longer than his academic achievements. He did, how- 
ever, receive the degree of B. A. on the 27th of Febru- 
ary, 1750. 

He was now pressed by his uncle Contarlne to pre- 
pare himself for the Church. This occupied another two 
years, spent, not altogether in clerical pursuits, some- 
times with his brother Henry, who was living in the 
old house at Pallas in quiet parsonage beneficence, 
sometimes with his friend Robert Bryanton in a club 
of happy spirits at the inn of Ballymahon. His disin- 
clination for orders was seconded by the bishop, possi- 
bly because of his lack of interest and evident unfitness, 
probably because of his appearing for ordination, so the 
story runs, in scarlet breeches. 

Next he received a position as tutor in the house of 
a Mr. Flinn, but after a few weeks a quarrel at cards 
caused him to resign it. With his pay, however, he 
bought a horse, and, his pocket still being full of 
money, set off on his second expedition to see the world. 
He reached Corlc, but the ship he had engaged passage 
on got away while he was gaming in a tavern, and 
finally, having lost his horse and most of his money, he 
returned home on a sorry nag called " Fiddleback." 
His friends and family thereupon, on some unthinkable 
hypothesis, decided he should go to London and study 
law. This time he got no farther than Dublin. His 
mother had scolded him for his Cork adventure, and 



236 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

now even the gentle Henry's patience began to weaken ; 
the only welcome the poor vagabond received was from 
his steadfast uncle Contarine. 

Depending on this man's benevolence, Goldsmith 
sallied forth once more, in the autumn of 1752 — this 
time to try medicine in Edinburgh. The Scotch capital 
was actually reached and some study was no doubt done 
there ; but boon companions and gaming and unre- 
strained charity — all of which impoverish — were 
chiefly in evidence. " Has George Conway put up a sign 
yet ; or John Binley left off drinking drams ; or Tom 
Allen got a new wig?" he writes to his friend Bryan- 
ton, and a deal more of the fair ladies of Scotland apd 
of protestations of friendship for Robert Bryanton, 
Esq., of Ballymahon, — but no word of midnight lamp 
" in some high lonely tower " and of realms conquered 
in the region of physic. 

It must not be inferred from this that Goldsmith was 
either a dullard or a degenerate. His pranks never 
meant more than excessive mirthfulness, and his im- 
providence and indolence were brightened by his wit 
and by a very sensitive observation. He did, moreover, 
spend two winters at Edinburgh in something like study. 
Then he determined to polish off his medical education 
at the great Continental universities of Paris and Ley- 
den. 

As might be supposed, foreign manners interested 
Goldsmith more than studies. He did spend about a 
year at Ley den and some time at Paris, though there 
is some doubt whether he ever attended Padua, from 
which place he afterwards asserted he was graduated. 
Of course he was thrown into all sorts of adventures. 
His purchase of an expensive tulip, as a gift for his 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 237 

uncle Contarine, was of a piece with his earlier extrava- 
gance, and he was consequently forced to teach English 
to earn his bread. But the crowning touch to his pic- 
turesque existence was his setting forth for a tour of 
the continent, early in 1756, with an equipment of one 
shirt, a flute, and a guinea. At Geneva he got the posi- 
tion of traveling tutor to the son of a wealthy English 
pawnbroker, but they got on poorly together and sepa- 
rated at Marseilles. In Italy, where his flute would not 
earn him a lodging, — for, he says, "Every peasant was 
a better musician than I," — he had recourse to what 
he calls his " skill in disputation." " In all the foreign 
universities and convents," he writes, " there are, upon 
certain days, philosophical theses maintained against 
every adventitious disputant, for which, if the champion 
opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in 
money, a dinner, and a bed for one night." Goldsmith 
was a better disputant than conversationalist, but the 
picture of him standing up in his gay garments and 
gravely opposing philosophical theses, his flute sticking 
out of his pocket the while, is one altogether humorous 
and picturesque. 

Finally, on hearing of the illness of his uncle, he 
turned towards home. On foot through France he was 
carried along by his " magic flute." Of this life he gives 
a picture in the Traveller : — 

" Gay, sprightly land of mirth and social ease, 
Pleased with thyself, whom all the world can please, 
How often have I led thy sportive choir 
With tuneless pipe beside the murmuring Loire ! 

Yet would the village praise my wondrous power, 
And dance forgetful of the noontide hour." 



238 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

An almost Orphean performance — to make a whole 
French village forget its lunch ! 

Here comes properly a division in any account of 
Goldsmith. Now begins his literary story : his poverty 
and hack-writing in London, his meeting with Johnson, 
his admittance into the " Club," his greatest literary 
achievements, and his sudden popularity. It has been 
necessary to dweU at some length on his early days, that 
a fair idea of his character may be given. It is not to be 
thought, however, that his picturesque adventures now 
cease, — indeed, half of them would fill a volume, — 
but the greater genius of the man begins, during these 
London days, to break forth, and it must naturally claim 
the chief attention. 

At first he lived in abject poverty. He was rejected by 
an apothecary and forced to take part in barn-theatri- 
cals. " Poor houseless Goldsmith ! " says Irving ; " to 
what shifts he must have been driven to find shelter 
and sustenance for himself in this his first venture into 
London ! Many years afterwards, in the days of his 
social elevation, he startled a polite circle at Sir Joshua 
Reynolds' by humorously dating an anecdote about the 
time he 'lived among the beggars of Axe Lane.' " For 
a short time he endured the position of usher in a school, 
but the laughter of the boys at his manners and dress, 
and the discomfort of sleeping in the same bed with a 
pomatum-scented French teacher, led him hastily to 
abandon the situation. Again he tried medicine, and 
set up in a small way in Bankside, attiring himself inap- 
propriately in a second-hand suit of green and gold. 

The opening wedge to his literary career, however, 
was his acquaintance with Samuel Richardson, the 
author of Clarissa Harlowe. Richardson's printer was 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 239 

Goldsmith's patient, and through him work was pro- 
cured at Richardson's press in Salisbury Court. He be- 
gan, too, to make other acquaintances — notably Dr. 
Edward Young, the famous author of Night Thoughts. 
Finally, through a Dr. Milner, the father of an Edin- 
burgh friend, whose school he took charge of during Dr. 
Milner's illness. Goldsmith met Griffiths, editor of the 
Monthly Review. For Griffiths he did Grub Street 
work at small pay, but after five months quarreled with 
his " illiterate, bookselling " editor. 

Indeed, the way to literary recognition was yet long 
and perilous. After spending some time more in hack- 
work for various publishers, Goldsmith jumped at Dr. 
Milner's promise to use his influence to get him a med- 
ical appointment in India. Goldsmith, in anticipation 
of future splendor, left his garret for a first floor room, 
but the post, to his great discomfort, was given to an- 
other. Added to this humiliation was his rejection by 
the College of Surgeons at an examination in Decem- 
ber, 1758. Poor Oliver must back to his garret and his 
debts. 

No picture, from all accounts, of a dingy garret, with 
rat-riddled floor and dirty, broken window-panes, with 
meagre furniture and a bed that fairly protests against 
incumbrance, can exaggerate the squalor of Goldsmith's 
lodgings at No. 12, Green Arbor Court. Here at the top 
of " Breakneck Stairs " he scribbled at times literally for 
his life — cold as he was in scanty raiment and hungry 
for scanty fare. Below, the court rang vnth the cries 
of quarreling washerwomen and guttersnipes ; alleys 
crowded with the victims of poverty, vice, and disease 
were his daily and nightly passages. It may have been 
well that he took little thought for the morrow ; his 



240 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

geniality perhaps saved him. At all events, he managed 
somehow to endure a condition bordering on destitution. 

Little by little, however, his ability asserted itself. 
His Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning in 
Europe at least attracted attention ; and his contribu- 
tions (later published as the Citizen of the World) in 
1760 to Newbery's Public Ledger, and his writings 
in the Bee relieved his circumstances sufficiently for 
him to take good lodgings in Wine Office Court, hard by 
the Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street, an inn frequented by 
Dr. Johnson and his friends. In his new lodgings Gold- 
smith was visited by men of some contemporary renown, 
and on one memorable evening, the 31st of May, 1761, 
he was the host of Dr. Johnson. Johnson had passed 
through an apprenticeship hardly less severe than Gold- 
smith's, but now he was the " great lexicographer," the 
defier of Lord Chesterfield, and the " Ursa Major " of 
literary circles. His friendship, which rapidly grew in 
warmth, proved invaluable to Goldsmith. Through him 
the young Irishman became a visitor at Davies's book- 
shop and a guest at Mrs. Davies's tea-parties, where he 
met Bennet Langton, the scholar. Dr. Percy, of ballad 
fame, and Warburton, the burly divine and defender of 
Pope. 

It was through this friendship with Johnson, in fact, 
that Goldsmith was taken as an original member into 
the famous literary club, started in 1764. The senten- 
tious doctor was indisputably the chief, and his wiU pre- 
vailed in spite of objections to Goldsmith's Grub-street 
trade. No literary gathering, unless that with the " wit- 
combats " at the Mermaid, has numbered such a rare 
, assemblage. They met weekly at the Turk's Head on 
Gerard Street. Reynolds, the great painter, was there, 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 241 

Burke, soon to startle Parliament with his oratory, 
Topham Beauclerk with his graceful sarcasm, Langton 
with his wisdom, Garrick with his sallies on Goldsmith, 
who, he said, — 

" Wrote like an angel and talked like Poor Poll," 

Gibbon the historian, Jones the great linguist. Bos- 
well with his note-book, and, above all, the disputa- 
tious doctor, thundering oracularly, prepared for any 
encounter, ever ready to support sincerity and to con- 
demn hypocrisy and cant. Goldsmith was of course 
often the butt, but he usually found a sturdy champion 
in Johnson, and he was generally beloved for his ge- 
niality and generosity. He managed, too, to contribute 
his share of clever sayings, perhaps the best of which 
was his remark, when some one called Boswell a Scotch 
cur at Johnson's heels, that the Scotchman was not a 
cur; "he is only a bur," he said. "Tom Davies flung 
him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of 
sticking." 

It is not to be supposed, however, that Goldsmith 
was from now on financially at ease. The very year of 
his prosperity, 1764, news came to Johnson that his 
friend was in the direst straits and at the mercy of a 
relentless landlady. The doctor sent a guinea as earnest 
of succor and as soon as possible hurried himself to 
Wine Office Court. There he found Goldsmith, who 
had already converted the guinea into Madeira, enter- 
taining the now more amenable landlady. By luck the 
doctor learned of the manuscript of The Vicar, saw 
at a glance its merit, and sold it to a bookseller for sixty 
pounds. 

Newbery, to whom the book was sold, did not, how- 



242 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ever, publish it for two years, and meanwhile the work 
which first brought Goldsmith an established reputa- 
tion appeared. It was The Traveller^ and was hailed 
on all sides with admiration. At last Goldsmith had 
achieved some sort of permanent success, and he never 
again suffered greatly from lack of recognition. He con- 
tinued to write voluminously and often worthlessly, for 
he had the boldness to attempt, after marshaling a wide 
but superficial knowledge, histories of England, Rome, 
and Greece, and a Natural History. In the last-named 
Goldsmith said that the cow sheds its horns at three 
years old. Johnson had already remarked : " Goldsmith, 
sir, will give us a very fine book upon the subject ; but 
if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe, 
may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history." 
Five of his works, however, have by their popularity 
for a century and a half amply justified Johnson's ad- 
miration for his genius. In ITie Traveller (1764) and 
The Deserted Village (1770) he took rank as a good 
if not a great poet in an age of prose ; and he brought 
to the heroic couplet a simplicity and a sincerity long 
unknown. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) he wrote 
one of the most famous novels of all time ; and in his 
two plays. The Good-Natured Man (1767) and She 
Stoops to Conquer (1773) he not only did much to 
cure the silly sentimentality of the stage, but he wrote 
in the latter a play that still acts astonishingly well. 
These five works live for their gentle humor and gen- 
uine pathos. It is indeed a very great thing to have 
written a novel which has contrived to keep its place on 
the shelf beside such works as The Pilgrirris Progress 
and JRohinson Crusoe. 

One of the first recognitions of Goldsmith's genius 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 243 

was the nomination of him in 1769 by the Royal 
Academy to the position of honorary professor of his- 
tory. It must not be supposed, however, that Dr. Gold- 
smith, for all his recognition, ceased that picturesque 
existence which colored so quaintly his youthful career. 
He still kept up a speaking acquaintance with his old 
friend, poverty. He was still fond of gay garments, and 
he might often be seen, caparisoned in his bloom- 
colored coat, bag-wig, and sword, strutting about the 
Temple Gardens. He still, too, blundered as if by in- 
stinct into odd experiences, and was as always the butt 
of his friends. There was sometimes a touch of malice 
in the sallies of Garrick, who had some cause, perhaps, 
and of Boswell, who was after all Boswell, but the rest 
were always in good fun. One joke played on him by 
Burke illustrates especially his naive simplicity. Burke, 
having passed him staring at some ladies in the square, 
accused him, when they met at Sir Joshua's, of exclaim- 
ing that the crowd must be " stupid beasts " to stare 
so at those "painted Jezebels," while a man of his parts 
went unnoticed. Goldsmith denied having said it, but 
upon Burke's replying, " If you had not said so, how 
should I have known it? " he answered feebly : "I am 
very sorry — it was very foolish; I do recoUect that 
something of the kind passed through my mind, but I 
did not think I had uttered it." " Sir, he was a fool," 
said one who had known him, to the poet Rogers. " If 
you gave him back a bad shilling, he 'd say, Why, it 's as 
good a shilling as ever was horn. You know he ought to 
have said coined. Coined, sir, never entered his head. 
He was a fool, sir." But he held his own with his pen 
and in the Retaliation, called forth by one of Garrick's 
thrusts, he met his playful friends on their own ground. 



244 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

It Is perhaps of a piece with Goldsmith's character 
in general, yet rather remarkable for one of his ten- 
derness, that he never became seriously attached to 
any lady. Miss Keynolds, it is true, ceased to consider 
him ugly when she had heard the Traveller read aloud. 
There were, moreover, two sisters, Catharine and Mary 
Horneck, nicknamed " Little Comedy " and the " Jes- 
samy Bride," of whom Goldsmith was very fond. " Little 
Comedy " was soon married to a Mr. Bunbury, so it 
was on the " Jessamy Bride " that Goldsmith showered 
most of his awkward attention. This affection may have 
inspired, Irving thinks, the vast addition of gay silken 
things at this time to the poet's wardrobe. His friends 
rallied him much about the "Jessamy Bride," and she 
on her part treasured a lock of hair that was taken after 
his death — a touching tribute to the gentle, loving man 
whose blunders and ugly features helped him into the 
affections of men and shut him out almost wholly from 
the love of women. 

While yet in middle life, however. Goldsmith came 
to an untimely death. His health failed rapidly, ex- 
travagances had renewed his debts, and an attempt at 
prescribing for himself only precipitated the fever from 
which he never recovered. On April 4, 1774, he died 
rather suddenly, in his forty-seventh year. " Sir Joshua 
is of opinion," wrote Johnson to Boswell, " that he [Gold- 
smith] owed not less than two thousand pounds. Was 
ever poet so trusted before ? " " Poor Goldy " was greatly 
mourned. Sir Joshua, who was much affected, " did 
not touch the pencil for that day, a circumstance most 
extraordinary for him who passed no day without a 
line.'''' A large body of men distinguished in letters and 
politics followed him to his grave, which stands alone 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH 245 

in the Court of the Middle Temple. It is significant of 
his lifelong inability to attain and maintain a position 
in the innermost circles of respect that he thus lies alone 
with no comment but his name in Temple Court, while 
Johnson and Garrick, who achieved such overwhelming 
honor in their lifetime, lie side by side in Westminster 
Abbey. There is a touch of pathos in the man even after 
his death. 

" Goldsmith," says Coleridge, " did everything hap- 
pily," and in so saying really explains the charm of the 
man. When we know the simplicity and generosity of 
his life, his gentleness and his awkwardness — in short, 
the pathos and the humor of him, then we shall not 
only grow to love the village preacher in the Deserted 
Village and Dr. Primrose, unsophisticated, foolish, and 
loving, in the Vicar of Wakejield, and the incompar- 
ably amusing scenes of She Stoops to Conquer^ but, far 
more than this, we shall be privileged to join that great 
host of his readers who have unaffectedly laughed and 
wept with him. No person, once he is understood, has 
so contagious a spirit as Goldsmith. He is probably the 
most picturesque and certainly the most lovable figure 
among English writers. 



EDMUND BURKE 

No great English writer has been more closely con- 
nected with politics than Burke. He was much less an 
adroit politician than an able writer, yet now, when the 
smaller men who passed him in pursuit of office are 
forgotten, he is remembered not only for his impressive 
style, but also for his broad political wisdom. " There 
was a catholicity about his gaze," says Mr. Augustine 
Birrell. " He knew how the whole world lived." 

Next to Burke's great store of knowledge, his most 
striking characteristic is his fervor. In Parliament he 
was called " the Irish Adventurer ; " once, in his indig- 
nation at a navy scandal, he threw " the fine gilt book 
of estimates " at the Treasurer of the Navy ; another 
time Fox and Sheridan had to hold him by the coat-tails; 
when he was aroused, he burst into a torrent of invec- 
tive. " He was so violent, so overbearing, so arrogant, 
so intractable," said Lord Lansdowne, " that to have 
got on with him in a cabinet would have been utterly 
and absolutely impossible." It is easy to see why such 
a man, an Irishman untamed to the last, consistently a 
supporter of the minority, should have been kept out 
of high office. The remarkable thing is that, almost 
single-handed, he could hold the field so long. 

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on January 12, 
1729 (N. S.). His father, Richard Burke, a solicitor 
in good standing, was a Protestant; his mother, of the 
family of Nagle, was a Roman Catholic. Young Burke's 
early education was chiefly at the school of a Quaker, 



EDMUND BURKE 247 

Abraham Shackleton, at Ballitore. From here in 1743 
Burke went up to Trinity College, Dublin, where he 
took his degree of B. A. in 1748. He was not conspic- 
uous as a good student, but he knew his Latin well, 
showed plenty of ability, and spent much time in read- 
ing. In 1750 he decided to study law and was entered 
at the Middle Temple, London. He never took seriously 
to the work, however, and when he gave it up soon 
after, his angry father withdrew the allowance of ,£100. 
Yet during these years of desultory study Burke ac- 
quired that wide and exhaustive knowledge which 
was his best equipment. He " understands everything," 
W. G. Hamilton said later, " but gaming and music." 
Mr. Birrell draws a good picture of this time of prepara- 
tion. Burke, he says, " was fond of roaming about the 
country, during, it is to be hoped, vacation-time only, 
and is to be found writing the most cheerful letters to 
his friends in Ireland (all of whom are persuaded that 
he is going some day to be somebody, though sorely 
puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so pleasantly 
does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way 
country places, where he lodges with quaint old land- 
ladies who wonder maternally why he never gets drunk, 
and generally mistake him for an author until he pays 
his biU." 

Help from home failing, Burke took to his pen. In 
1756 he published his Philosophical Inquiry into the 
Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beauti- 
ful^ a heavy treatise begun when he was nineteen ; and 
his Vindication of Natural Society, a satirical imita- 
tion of Bolingbroke, which called much attention to the 
young author. As a result his father was pleased to 
send him £100. Three years later (1759) Burke un- 



248 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

dertook to write Dodsley's Annual Register., for which 
he received .£100 a year and which he continued till 
1788. 

Before he began to work for Dodsley Burke was a 
married man. Some years back he had given up, on ac- 
count of weak health, his noisy lodgings near Temple 
Bar and had gone to live with his physician, Dr. Nugent. 
There he fell in love with the doctor's daughter, Jane, to 
whom he was married in the winter of 1756. Among 
his friends he was well known for his " orderly and am- 
iable domestic habits." 

It is unfortunate that so little is known of the third 
decade of Burke's life, for by the end of it he was already 
a man of respected opinion. It is very significant that 
in 1758 he was able unchallenged to dispute the great 
Dr. Johnson at Garrick's Christmas dinner. The follow- 
ing year he accepted the position of private secretary to 
William G. (" Single Speech ") Hamilton, and in 1761 
went with Hamilton to Ireland. But Burke was not 
the mere servant his employer would have had him, and 
when Hamilton sought to bind him by favors, Burke 
indignantly gave up his pension of X300 and left Ham- 
ilton for good. This was in 1764. In the same year he 
joined the famous Literary Club. 

In the Club he was a greatly respected member. Men 
loved him easily — especially Johnson, who admired his 
mental powers, Garrick, who helped him through many 
financial troubles, and Reynolds, who made him one of 
his executors and left him, in 1792, ^2000. Of course 
the Tory Johnson abominated Burke's politics. " Sir," 
he said in 1774, "he is a cursed Whig, a hottomless 
Whig, as they aU are now." But politics aside, the doc- 
tor had much admiration for the man. Burke, he said, 



EDMUND BURKE 249 

" does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because 
his mind is full." 

The following year, 1765, Burke became private sec- 
retary to Rockingham, First Lord of the Treasury. In 
December he was sent up to the House of Commons for 
Wendover. "Now we who know Mr. Burke," said Dr. 
Johnson, " know that he will be one of the first men in 
the country." Unfortunately for Burke, Rockingham 
was removed in 1766 to make way for Grafton, of Chat- 
ham's ministry. 

The eclipse of Rockingham in 1766 gives a chance 
for another look at Burke's private life. In 1768 he 
purchased a large estate near Beaconsfield, in Buck- 
inghamshire. Where Burke got the money has never 
been satisfactorily explained. A large part of the 
X20,600 was covered by mortgage, and most of the 
rest was borrowed, but it is supposed that Burke made 
something by his interest in the speculations of his 
brother Richard and his cousin William. It is certain 
that after their collapse in 1769 Burke was constantly 
in financial trouble. Still, he continued to live at Bea- 
consfield, keeping four black horses, and at an annual 
expense of ,£2500. It is known that he received much 
help from his friends. Besides that from Garrick and 
Reynolds, the Marquis of Rockingham gave him great 
assistance when in his will he directed that all Burke's 
bonds held by him, bonds amounting to <£30,000, should 
be canceled. Whatever is thought of Burke's free 
acceptance of help, it must not be forgotten that he 
himself was very generous and that the charge of dis- 
honesty in business, made by his detractors, is quite 
unfounded. Very fond of planting and farming, he was 
eager to have a " retreat " from London ; indeed, Bea- 



250 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

consfield seemed to him as necessary a luxury as 
Abbotsford did to Walter Scott. One of Burke's best 
sides, too, that of the scholar, the philanthropist, and 
the quiet rural philosopher, is seen at Beaconsfield. 

It is necessary, before following Burke farther in his 
career, to remember clearly the changes of administra- 
tion during the next twenty years and the position which 
he took in 1770 : the first to avoid confusion, the second 
to judge fairly of his so-called apostasy in 1791. The 
Chatham ministry, then, which in 1766 put Rocking- 
ham out of office, was so liberal in its Whiggism that it 
brought about in 1770 the Lord North ministry, equally 
illiberal in its Toryism and directly provocative of the 
American war. After twelve years of misrule, " the 
King's friends," with Lord North at the helm, gave way 
to Rockingham. But he died only three months after 
return to power; Shelburne was unable long to hold 
the Whigs together; and in the spring of 1783 grew 
up the strange Coalition Ministry, nominally under the 
Duke of Portland, but really under the Whig Fox 
and the Tory North. In December of the same year 
the ministry of the younger Pitt came into power. 

During all these changes between riotous Whiggism 
and tyrant Toryism Burke held on the same course : 
he was a conservative Whig. To be sure, he befriended 
Irish Catholics, though he himself was a Protestant, 
and he took up the cause of America. This position, 
however, was taken because he believed firmly in the 
constitutional liberties of the people and in religious 
toleration ; he had from the outset that quality which 
came out so strongly in the French crisis, — a veneration 
for tradition and established order ; he hated license 
and anarchy. That he later modified his opinions is true, 



EDMUND BURKE 251 

but that he turned coat is false. He was never, indeed, 
a very free-thinking Whig, in the days when Whiggism 
ran riot, and he was never, in his bitterest denunciation 
of the French Revolution, a Tory at heart. 

Burke's parliamentary position, from the first against 
the King, was clearly registered by his protests against 
excluding Wilkes, no doubt notorious, but nevertheless 
elected, from his seat in the House. Soon after followed 
Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), 
an attempt to recall the policies of 1688. Lord Chat- 
ham wrote in complaint to Rockingham, who showed 
the letter to Burke. Burke never got over his wrath at 
Chatham's disapproval, though he admitted " the great 
splendid side " of his adversary's character. 

In general, three great questions occupied Burke : 
America, India, and France. In his attack on Eng- 
land's treatment of America he was at his best. Disap- 
pointments had not yet made him bitter, nor repetitions 
shrill ; he brought to the subject more information and 
more sane judgment than any other man in Parlia- 
ment; and he expressed his views with an eloquence 
and dignity that set him far above all others in the 
dispute. In 1774, elected member for Bristol, then the 
second city in England, he made his Speech on Taxa- 
tion, a protest against the tea tax. The following year 
(March 22, 1775) he spoke for three hours on Con- 
ciliation with the American Colonies. Holding to the 
belief that taxation without representation is unjust, 
seeing that representation in the case of the distant 
American Colonies was impossible, and foreseeing the 
disaster of coercion, he suggested that the colonies be 
permitted to make voluntary grants, that they be given 
the power of refusal, " the first of aU revenues." Burke's 



252 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

speech contained maxims for all time ; to us to-day 
it seems to have found a reasonable remedy for the 
American complaint ; but his far-reaching wisdom was 
ill-adapted to the understanding of the scheming poli- 
ticians about him. He might tell them that " An Eng- 
lishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another 
Englishman into slavery," that " The ocean remains. 
You cannot pump this dry ; " — his oracular sentences 
were in vain. The " King's friends " were hopelessly in 
the majority, and Burke's proposition was defeated — 78 
yeas, 270 noes. Two years later came his famous Let- 
ter to the Sheriffs of Bristol on the Affairs of America. 
Closely associated with him in this fight against Lord 
North's ministry was the young and brilliant statesman, 
Charles James Fox, from 1774 to 1782 Burke's firm 
friend and ally. 

In 1782, on the return of Rockingham to power, 
Burke . fully expected high office, and felt keenly the 
appointment to so subordinate a position as Paymaster 
of Forces. He put into practice, however, his theory of 
economical reform, brought forward two years before, by 
regulating his salary at .£4000 instead of pocketing the 
large " balance," as his predecessors had done. Under 
the Coalition Ministry (1783) he was again paymaster, 
but on Pitt's accession to power in December of the 
same year he lost his position and never again held 
office. His popularity in Parliament, too, was waning; 
in 1780 he had been defeated for Bristol and thereafter 
sat for Malton. Soon after Pitt's coming in, in fact, 
Burke was in great disfavor. Once when he rose to 
speak, so many noisily left the room that he sat down. 
" I could teach a pack of hounds," he cried out in the 
House one day, " to yelp with greater melody and more 



EDMUND BURKE 253 

compreliension." Much of his time was now spent in 
retirement at Beaconsfield. 

But Burke, as every one realized, was an authority on 
India. He had already been attacking the corruption in 
the government there ; so when, in 1786, he worked up 
his charge against Warren Hastings, he found both Fox 
and Sheridan ready to support him. On May 10, 1787, 
he appeared at the bar of the House of Peers and sol- 
emnly impeached Hastings of " high crimes and mis- 
demeanors." The trial began on February 13, 1788, in 
Westminster Hall. Burke spoke during four sittings. 
Investigations followed and the trial dragged through 
several years. In 1794 Burke made his famous nine 
days' speech in reply to the defense of Hastings and thus 
finished his work for the impeachment. Hastings was 
finally acquitted, but Burke's investigations were really 
what first prompted reform in the administration of 
India. 

While the trial of Hastings was going on, Burke 
found time for his third great interest, France. He first 
touched the subject in a letter, October, 1789, to a 
Frenchman, M. Dupont. Not long afterwards, the open 
sympathy of many English for the uprising in France 
caused him to write his Reflections on the Revolution^ 
published in November, 1790. In these reflections he 
was no longer the seK-contained upholder of constitu- 
tional liberty ; disgusted by the bloody spectacle of a king 
dragged through the streets, horrified by the irreverent 
subversion of ancient, respectable institutions, he came 
forth the defender of established order. He saw only 
chaos and crime in the Revolution ; he missed its main 
significance. Sheridan and Fox, who saw great promise 
in the capture of the Bastile, opposed Burke, who they 



254 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

thought was growing positively monarchical. But it 
must not be supposed that Burke took suddenly to 
shouting for George III. He had always resisted the 
tyranny of kings and would still have done so, no doubt, 
if he had not given his whole animosity to what he 
thought a much worse tyranny, — that of mobs and 
atheists. Thus he became, by force of his own reason- 
ing, over-conservative ; he even went so far as to op- 
pose Fox's bill (1790) for the repeal of the Test and 
Corporation Acts. The King was naturally delighted 
with the JRpflactions^ said it was " a good book, a very 
good book ; every gentleman ought to read it." Its 
author had certainly lost his old cool judgment, but he 
was still eloquent and noble. As a result there was a 
strong reaction against the Ilevolution, and the Whig 
Party was almost demolished. 

The most serious result for Burke himself was the 
final alienation from his old friend. Fox. The Whigs 
were indignant, and Burke, far from a Tory, was thus 
practically cut off from all party. Yet he was still an 
important figure : he was in correspondence with French 
royalists, and the Catholics of Ireland still looked to him 
for help. In 1792 he published his Appeal from the 
New to the Old Whigs, and in the fall of the same 
year took his stand on the ministerial side. Such a posi- 
tion made it necessary for him to resign (in 1793) from 
the Whig Club. 

In 1794 Burke's days of active service came to an 
end. The death of his son, who had just taken his seat 
for Malton, was a heavy blow ; and the last three years 
of his life he passed in retirement at Beaconsfield. There 
his chief interests were managing his farm, looking after 
poor neighbors, caring for the education of the children 



EDMUND BURKE 255 

of French refugees, and writing indignant pamphlets. 
One of these, the Letter to a Noble Lord (1795), 
was a reply, in which he justified himself, to an attack 
on his acceptance of pensions. He had been offered a 
peerage, but since he had no son to inherit it, he pre- 
ferred pensions amounting to .£3700. Other important 
pamphlets during these last days were Letters on a 
Regicide Peace (1796), marked by his failing judg- 
ment and rising indignation. By this time he had begun 
to suffer from internal abscesses ; he declined rapidly 
and died on July 9, 1797. He was buried, according to 
his wish, at Beaconsfield, in spite of Fox's generous 
suggestion of Westminster Abbey. " There is but one 
event," wrote Canning shortly after, " but that is an 
event for the world — Burke is dead." 

It can hardly escape notice that the chief schemes 
Burke advocated failed of adoption, or that he himself 
was never a cabinet minister. He was practically always 
in the minority. But the real cause of his failure, as 
well as of his greatness, lay in the fact that his nature 
was essentially poetic and philosophical. He scorned 
preferment at the compromise of his views or his ideals, 
and of course he failed, in the reign of George III, as 
a politician. The great strength of his political wisdom, 
feared but only half appreciated by most of his con- 
temporaries, was that it was not " partial," " pinched," 
" occasional," like Lord North's, but that it was funda- 
mental, for all time. "A great empire and little minds 
go ill together ; " " whenever a separation is made be- 
tween liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe; " 
— such sentences abound in Burke. " I have learnt 
more," said Fox, " from my right honorable friend than 
from all the men with whom I ever conversed." 



THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM 

The period which extends roughly from 1780 to 
1830 is usually called the Age of Romanticism. It 
was distinctly a time of reaction, a reassertion of the 
poetic nature always strong in the English people. 
Towards the end of the eighteenth century there came 
a general protest against the cold conformity to rule 
that had been the aim of writers under Anne and the 
early Georges. The result was that imagination got the 
upper hand and that the age became one of enthusiasm 
and poetry instead of one of sophistication and prose. 
Yet men had been taught a lesson by the school of 
Pope. The Elizabethans, as the Rev. Stopford Brooke 
points out, had followed chiefly the instincts of nature ; 
the Augustans, on the other hand, had lost themselves 
in artificial devices. It remained for the Romanticists 
to combine the two — art and nature. This period, 
therefore, produced many great poets ; it stands, in 
fact, next to the great age of EHzabeth in literary sig- 
nificance. 

The beginnings of the Romantic reaction can be 
traced underground into the very strongholds of the 
Augustans. Faint signs of it begin in the hey-day of 
Pope's despotism ; and though Dr. Johnson, still true 
to the Augustan traditions, made fun of the ballads 
which his friend Percy collected in 1765, and scourged 
Macpherson for forging in Ossian what Johnson held 
to be contemptible stuff, yet ballad and epic were alike 
trumpet-calls in the Romantic movement. 



THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM 257 

The most general characteristics of this period are 
freedom from restraint and a love for the strange and 
the picturesque, what Walter Pater has called " strange- 
ness added to beauty." For purposes of study, how- 
ever, it will be found convenient to subdivide into 
five heads, though it must be remembered that no 
writers so defy glib classification as the Romantic 
writers and that the ticketing of poets with this or that 
characteristic is a fatal practice. (1) Men, wearying of 
the artificial fripperies of the Queen Anne age, began 
to seek natural beauty. At first they had resort only 
to quiet, rural, noon-day nature ; but soon the interest 
deepened into a fondness for wild and awe-inspiring 
scenery, for the mountains and the storm-swept sea. 
(2) Another feature was the revival of the Middle 
Ages, a keen interest in ancient tales of mystery and 
romantic deeds, a love of the picturesqueness and pa- 
geantry of olden times. This is the widest characteristic 
of the time ; it has, in fact, given the name Romantic 
to the period. (3) A phase in common with the French 
Revolution was a growing sympathy with the life of the 
poor, a sympathy felt more keenly by individual poets, 
such as Burns and Wordsworth, than by the people as 
a whole. (4) A very natural development, too, which 
resulted from greater freedom of thought and a more 
inquiring spirit, was a more genuine, fundamental phi- 
losophy. In many cases of morbid or highly emotional 
men this brought about over-wrought self-analysis, with 
the double result of great advance in thought and 
of frequent melancholia. Such Hamlet-moods may be 
found in nearly all the poets. (5) Finally, the verse- 
form kept pace with the freedom of thought. Poets, 
emancipated from the tyranny of the heroic couplet, 



258 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

interested in the literatures of all ages, tried many differ- 
ent metres. At first they followed chiefly Spenser and 
Milton, but soon they revived baUad stanza, the Italian 
"ottava rima," the sonnet, and a variety of lyrical 
measures. 

In such an age of emotion and spontaneity most of 
the greater writers were of course poets. There were, 
to be sure, many able prose writers, such as Scott, 
Lamb, De Quincey ; but it is a significant fact that 
nearly all the prose-writers tried their hand at poetry ; 
the age was decidedly a poetic age. 



ROBERT BURNS 

It is significant that in speaking of the greatest 
Scotch poet we nine times in ten call him Bobbie 
Burns — a pleasant familiarity inspired only by a few 
great writers, such as Kit Marlowe and Dick Steele. 
To the readers of Burns's songs, he will ever be the 
blithesome Ayrshire farmer-boy who whistled and sang 
at the plow -tail. Indeed, as Carlyle points out, in one 
aspect he never wholly grew to full manhood ; be died 
a youth in his thirty-seventh year, full of the exuberant 
emotions and delusions of youth, still unsettled in moral 
conviction. Yet in another sense he grew up all too 
soon ; blossomed and flourished in a day, exhausted his 
strength like an unpruned plant. These two sides of 
Burns's nature remain distinct to the end. The one 
showed him at his best, truly a great genius, sincerely 
affectionate, of a fine independent spirit, bursting with 
fullness of song. The other manifested itself, by strange 
contrast, in his inconstancy, in his moral irresolution, 
in a deal of false pride. At first glance it is difficult 
to believe that Bobbie Burns, who wrote The Cotter's 
Saturday Night and Bonnie Doon, was the same person 
as Bab the Ranter, who drank away a good portion 
of his life, made irreverent songs about the clergy, and 
was the lover of a dozen women. As we come to a 
knowledge of the man's life, however, and of the circum- 
stances in which he was placed, we perceive that he was 
precisely the person in whom these two characters could 
find expression — with a splendid and tragic result. 



260 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Robert Burns, the son of William Burness [or 
Burnes] and Agnes Brown, was born on the 25th of 
January, 1759, in an " auld clay bigging" at Alloway, 
about two miles from the town of Ayr, Scotland. His 
father, a poor farmer, did his best for the education of 
his sons. He instructed them in arithmetic, borrowed 
books for them on history and theology, and loved to 
turn aside from his labors or to give up his evenings 
for " solid conversation " with them. Robert in after 
life spoke often of the sound training he had received 
from his father — a man with a good understanding, 
he wrote to Dr. Moore, of " men, their manners, and 
ways," and of a " stubborn ungainly integrity." This 
education at Ayr made up all of Burns's regular train- 
ing, except for an early period at the village school and 
instructions from the excellent Murdoch, a needy teacher 
engaged by Mr. Burness and some neighbors while the 
family lived at Mt. Oliphant. But the boy read so 
eagerly that by manhood he had acquired a respectable 
stock of book-learning, to say nothing of an education 
which his natural keenness and sympathy assimilated 
from everything he touched. At this early date the 
story of Sir William Wallace, he afterwards wrote, 
" poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will 
boil along there, till the flood gates of life shut in eter- 
nal rest." 

When Robert was seven his father moved to a farm 
at Mt. Oliphant, about two miles away. Here for eleven 
years the father and growing sons toiled to squeeze out 
of barren soil a wretched existence — the life which 
Burns afterwards referred to as "the unceasing moil of 
a galley-slave." In 1777 the family took another farm, 
at Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Robert now 



ROBERT BURNS 261 

began to show great tenderness for the Tarbolton 
lassies, in consequence of which he is found attending 
a dancing-school in the village. The Tarbolton Club, of 
which he was the leading spirit, was a curious gathering 
of country youths, who debated such questions as love 
and social duties. When Burns and his brother Gilbert 
moved in 1783 to a farm at Mossgiel, the club broke 
up ; it had taken its character and its life from its chief 
member, the genial, witty plowboy. 

In appearance Burns was tall and sinewy, with 
swarthy features, a slight stoop at the shoulders, from 
handling the plow, and large strong hands. His big 
dark eyes glowed like coals of fire when he spoke. " 1 
never saw," said Scott, " such another eye in a human 
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of 
my time." In conversation he excelled : the sharpness 
of his retorts, the pathos of his appeals, the modulation 
of his voice to the subject, the rapidity yet clearness of 
his articulation struck every one ; the Duchess of Gordon 
said he " carried her off her feet." " When animated 
in company," comments Allan Cunningham, " he was a 
man of a million ; his swarthy features glowed ; his 
eyes kindled up tiU they all but lightened ; his plow- 
man stoop vanished ; and his voice — deep, manly, and 
musical — added its sorcery of pathos or of wit, till the 
dullest owned the enchantments of his genius." 

After the death of his father, in 1784, a growing rest- 
lessness beset Burns. The farm at Mossgiel, on " high 
land with a wet bottom," yielded no better than Mt. 
Oliphant and Loehlea. Yet he stuck — a little irreso- 
lutely, perhaps — to the plow. A few years before, he 
had gone to Irvine to learn the trade of a flax-dresser, 
but nothing except bad companions had come of it. He 



262 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

was not indeed so much an incompetent farmer as a 
poverty-stricken farmer, tilling barren soil and dis- 
tracted by interests which had nothing to do with his 
work. As far as drawing the straightest furrow or 
sowing the most seed-corn in a day went, he had few 
superiors. He loved contests of rural activity. Once 
when he was equaled by a fellow worker in the harvest 
field, " Robert," said his rival, " I 'm no sae far behind 
this time, I 'm thinking." " John," answered the poet, 
" you 're behind in something yet — I made a sang while 
I was stooking." 

For all his geniality and gift of song, however, Burns 
was increasingly unhappy. In his very " sangs " made 
while he was " stooking " lay a seed of the growing dis- 
content : he was already conscious of his genius and he 
longed for leisure and wealth, that he might versify. If 
at this time he had decided fairly for the one or the 
other — farming or poetry — he might have been a 
happier, more successful man ; and, incidentally, the 
world might have been poorer of some of its best songs. 
One cannot regret the poetry that Burns did allow him- 
self, but rather the vacillation which consumed the good 
years of his life. Added to this fretting uncertainty, 
numerous and distracting love affairs conspired with 
the beginnings of too convivial habits, contracted at 
Irvine, to throw him into unrest. He was looked on, 
moreover, with suspicion by his religious superiors. A 
controversy between the ministers of the Old Light and 
the New Light in the Western Kirk had called forth 
from the poet Holy Willie's Prayer^ a poem full of 
the jovial, irreverent wit which his promiscuous com- 
radeship and his keen insight were sure to breed when 
he contemplated the austere elders of the kirk. The 



ROBERT BURNS 263 

whole matter — his flippancy and rare humor — is 
comprehended in one stanza of the poem; the keen 
ridicule must have been a veritable thorn in the side 
of the grave Calvinistic divines. " Holy Willie " prays : 

" O Thou, wha in the heavens dost dwell, 
Wha, as it pleases best thysel', 
Sends ane to heaven, and ten to hell, 

A' for thy glory, 
And no for onj' gude or ill 

They 've done afore thee ! " 

Of Burns's early love affairs the most serious were 
those with Mary Campbell and Jean Armour. For his 
"Highland Mary " he felt a truer passion than for any. 
In their affectionate farewell when he was leaving for 
Edinburgh they met by a brookside, wet their fingers 
in- the brook, exchanged Bibles, and swore eternal troth. 
But "fell death's untimely frost" snatched away his 
love; his only consolation was that her name inspired 
two of his tenderest melodies, Highland Mary and 
Mary in Heaven. 

The affair with Jean Armour is not so pleasing to 
remember. Soon after moving to Mossgiel Burns had 
met this girl, the amiable daughter of a master-mason. 
All through 1785 his courtship continued with varying 
passion until finally by a forbidden marriage she bore 
him children. It is unpleasant to reflect that it was 
almost immediately after his separation from Jean — 
the indignant mason having refused to countenance the 
marriage — that Burns plighted his troth with Mary 
Campbell by the brookside. It was not till he moved 
to EUisland in 1788 that he finally took Jean as his 
lawful wife; and for all his verses to "bonnie Jean" 
and his occasional praise of her figure or " wood-note 



264 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

wild," there was less of the fire of liis better affection 
shown the poor girl than was granted to many other 
women. Indeed, his letters to his friends Smith and 
Richmond, to whom he confided his heart's secrets with- 
out reticence or delicacy, show often a most ungenerous 
attitude towards the woman he owed protection. " I 
have waited on Armour since her return home," he 
writes Richmond; "not from any the least view of re- 
conciliation, but merely to ask for her health and — to 
you I will confess it — from a foolish hankering fond- 
ness — very ill placed indeed." And again, to Smith, 
when one might have expected his sin to be heavy upon 
him, he writes of another attachment — of a young lady 
who "flew off in a tangent of female dignity and re- 
serve, like a mounting lark in an April morning. . . . 
But I am an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such 
a cool, deliberate, prudent reply, as brought my bird 
from her aerial towerings, pop, down at my foot, like 
Corporal Trim's hat." He says himseK that he had a 
way when he met a lovely lass of " battering himself 
into a wa,rm affection ; " and he stands, Stevenson com- 
ments, " positively without a competitor " in that " de- 
bilitating and futile exercise." All through his life he 
was susceptible to feminine charm. Women inspired 
his best song ; they were, in many instances, his truest 
friends and advisers ; and they were the chief cause of 
his inconstancy and waywardness. To Robert Riddell 
he wrote : "I have been all along a miserable dupe to 
love." 

In judging Burns, however, we must take into ac- 
count, as Carlyle has so emphatically pointed out, not 
the amount of deflection alone, but the proportion 
of the deflection to the size of the orbit. Burns was 



ROBERT BURNS 265 

doubtless given to joviality succeeded by remorse ; he 
did fling his " honest poverty " into rich men's faces ; 
he did treat with disrespect the grave elders of the 
kirk ; he did approximate what Stevenson calls the 
professional Don Juan. But these failings must be 
weighed against his virtues : his spontaneous affection 
and generosity ; his intense patriotism ; and, chiefly, 
his great gift of song. To ask restraint from Burns 
in his love affairs would be to ask that many of his 
best songs had not been written. It should be clear, 
moreover, that his vices as his virtues were a result 
of the man and his environment ; bursting with passion, 
endowed with an insight which pierced unerringly 
through the religious and social mockeries of his day, 
dogged his life long by those two arch-foes, poverty and 
pride, he fell on unsympathetic times. 

Burns's poetry, on his own authority, was in him 
the result of love. " I never had the least thought or 
inclination of turning poet," he says, " till I once got 
heartily in love, and then rhyme and song were, in a 
manner, the spontaneous language of my heart." Many 
of the verses addressed to the fair were not, it must be 
understood, the result of serious attachment; mere 
woman-kind acted on his fancy "like inspiration." "I 
can no more desist rhyming on the impulse," he vn-ites 
to Miss Davies, " than an Eolian harp can refuse its 
tones to the streaming air." In the years at Lochlea 
and Mossgiel nearly all of his best longer poems were 
written ; in fact, only Tarn o' Shanter and some of the 
songs belong to a later period. His first publication 
(1786) in the Kilmarnock Edition, included such 
poems as The Cotter's Saturday Night, The Jolly 
Beggars, A Winter Night, Address to the Deil, To 



266 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

J. Lapraik^ the Epistles to Davie, To a Mouse, To 
a Mountain Daisy, and The Twa Dogs. 

" Give me ae spark o' nature's fire ! " 

he says, — 

" That 's a' the learning I desire; 
Then though I drudge thro' dub an' mire 

At pleugh or cart, 
My muse, though hamely in attire, 

May touch the heart." 

With the X20 made from the sale of his first volume 
Burns renewed his intention to embark for Jamaica, 
a scheme he had long considered as an escape from the 
difficulties at home. But the acclamation with which his 
poems were received and the enthusiastic invitations 
of friends induced him to visit Edinburgh. He had 
sprung into national fame. On his way he found the 
milkmaid and plowman singing his songs; at inns the 
guests and servants got out of bed to hear him talk; 
and the literati of Edinburgh opened their arms to him. 

Nothing could have been more characteristic o£ 
Burns than his life in Edinburgh. He was feted by the 
great and honored by the acquaintance of rich and 
learned alike, yet in no single instance did he display 
servility or embarrassment. With " manners direct from 
God," he was at ease in the innermost circles of 
aristocracy and by his ready, unaffected wit and bril- 
liant conversation charmed whole assemblies. Among 
his more intimate friends were : Professor Dugald 
Stewart ; Professor Walker ; Dr. Blair, the aged divine ; 
Mackenzie, author of the Man of Reeling ; " Robert- 
son, the famous historian; Mrs. Dunlop, direct descend- 
ant of William Wallace ; Lord Monboddo, the whim- 
sical judge; the Duchess of Gordon; James, Earl of 



ROBERT BURNS 267 

Glencairn ; and the accomplislied John Francis Erskine, 
Earl of Mar. Among all these notables he moved with 
the confidence of a peer. 

For a moment Burns's fortunes took a brighter turn. 
The Edinburgh edition of his poems (1787) yielded him 
above ,£500, though the payment was in part delayed. 
After making a tour of the Scotch border, with which 
he was not greatly impressed, he returned to Mossgiel. 
Here, however, discontent soon developed. The difficul- 
ties of farming the barren soil and the constant remind- 
ers of his affair with Jean Armour led him to return to 
Edinburgh. The second trip to the capital, however, was 
not so happy as the first. His circle of stanch friends 
was diminishing; society was tired of its plaything; 
Burns was established as a famous poet, but he was no 
longer the literary lion of the hour. Much more imme- 
diately significant to the poet, he was poor and without 
a fixed occupation. By his brilliant conversation he could 
still, to be sure, force momentary entrances where he 
would, but dining occasionally at the tables of aristocracy 
only brought home the scantiness of his usual " hamely 
fare." A trip to the Highlands with a friend, John Nicol, 
did little to dispel the dark clouds he saw ahead. With 
the Mossgiel failure behind him and with a dangerous 
tendency to conviviality, he became increasingly unset- 
tled in his ways and bitter in his attitude towards the 
rich. He began to talk much, often violently, about his 
"Rock of Independence." He had never bowed down 
to the " pride o' rank," and now, when he saw that ser- 
vility was necessary to material success, he burst out in 
disgust and anger ; in every fibre of him there vibrated 
his father's " stubborn ungainly integrity; " he could not 
contain himself before the presumptuous insolence of 



268 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

"yon birkie ca'd a lord." Sometimes his outbursts, espe- 
cially in his letters, are personal and ill-tempered, but 
for the most part he inspires sympathy and indignation. 

"For a' that, and a' that, 

Our toils obscure, and a' that; 
The rank is but the guinea's stamp. 
The man 's the gowd for a' that." 

In the spring of 1788, then. Burns, disgusted, indig- 
nant, and remorseful by turns, left Edinburgh and, tak- 
ing Jean Armour as his lawful wife, moved to a farm 
at Ellisland, on the River Nith, about six miles north 
of Dumfries. Ellisland, like Mossgiel, yielded little suc- 
cess. "Mr. Burns," said Allan Cunningham's father, 
"you have made a poet's not a farmer's choice;" and 
Burns himself, though he admired the scenery, spoke 
later of the land as the "riddlings of creation." To 
eke out his small income he accepted a position in the 
excise, and finally, the farm going from bad to worse, 
he made the fatal step of moving in 1791 to Dumfries, 
with his government office, X50 a year, as his only 
regular means of support. 

As an excise officer Burns worked diligently enough, 
but he had a contempt for his superiors which cost him 
advancement, and a kindness of heart which led him 
to wink at the little smugglings of the poor. One night, 
when the clatter of horses at the gallop took him from 
his bed to the window, he turned to his wife and whis- 
pered, " It 's smugglers, Jean." " Then I fear ye '11 be 
to foUow them?" she answered. " And so I would," said 
he, " were it Will Gunnion or Edgar Wright ; but it 's 
poor Brandyburn, who has a wife and three weans, and 
is no doing owre weel in his farm. What can I do?" 
Another time he led a force through the water and with 



ROBERT BURNS 269 

drawn sword carried a well-armed brig, but received a 
reprimand afterwards for buying four of the cannon and 
sending tbem to the Directory in France. It was on 
this occasion, while waiting for a fellow-of&cer who had 
gone for arms and men, that he composed the rollicking 
song, The Deil 's awa' wV the Exciseman, the very bur- 
den of which embodies the reckless humor with which 
he regarded his government position. He had not been 
ganger long, in fact, before he was charged with revo- 
lutionary principles. Besides the affair of the cannon, 
he had sat covered at the theatre while God sane the 
King was being sung, and he had done a deal of talk- 
ing, for the times, about despots and liberty. The re- 
proof from his superiors rather provoked than silenced 
more talk, about which there is just a suggestion of 
bravado. He took up the cause of France in verse, and 
once at a dinner, when Pitt's health was proposed, he 
cried, " Let us drink to the health of a greater and 
better man — George Washington." He was instructed 
that it was his "business to act, not to think." To which 
he might well have replied with his own lines : — 

" Here 's freedom to him that wad read, 
Here 's freedom to him that wad write ; 
There 's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard 
But them wham the truth wad iudite." 

The end was now very near. In 1795 the poet's health 
failed rapidly, and the following winter a dangerous 
condition was brought on by sleeping in the street one 
snowy night, after late convivality. Sea-bathing afforded 
less relief than the doctor had hoped, and at the same 
time Burns was depressed by a melancholy sense of his 
failings, of his inability to revive his weakening powers. 
On meeting a friend in the streets of Dumfries, he said, 



270 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

" I am going to ruin as fast as I can ; the best I can do 
is to go consistently." Once, when his friend Mrs. Riddell 
entered the room, his first words were : " Well, madam, 
have you any commands for the other world?" As he 
lay on his death-bed in the summer of 1796, he remarked 
to the doctor, with a flash of his old humor : " I am 
but a poor crow, and not worth picking ; " and to Gib- 
son, a fellow volunteer, — for Burns had enlisted for a 
short time in the volunteer service of Dumfries, — he 
said, smiling, " John, don't let the awkward squad fire 
over me." He died on the 21st of July, 1796. His fel- 
low townsmen were sufficiently aware of his genius, and, 
above all, fond of his kindly personality, to give him 
public funeral. His body was borne to the old kirk-yard 
by the volunteers, who, despite his request, fired three 
ragged volleys. 

About Burns there has gathered a great fund of anec- 
dotes, naturally bred of his brilliant conversation and 
his quick humor. There is a story told by one James 
Thomson, the son of a neighbor at EUisland : " I re- 
member Burns weel," said he ; " I have some cause to 
mind him. . . . Once I shot at a hare that was busy 
on our braird ; she ran bleeding past Burns : he cursed 
me and ordered me out of his sight, else he would throw 
me into the water. I 'm told he has written a poem 
about it." " But do you think he could have thrown you 
in ? " was asked. " Thrown ! Aye, I 'U warrant could 
he, though I was baith young and strong." Another 
time, at a wedding feast, Burns told some young fellows 
to stop quarreling or " he 'd hing them up in verse on 
the morrow." A clergyman once attempted to censure 
Burns's Holy Fair^ but he made a poor-fist of his crit- 
icism ; Burns's eye began to twinkle, and all present 



ROBERT BURNS 271 

looked for a sTiarp reply. " No," he said ; " by heaven, 
I '11 not touch him — 

" ' Dulness is sacred in a sound divine.' " 

Of the Edinburgh literati he made the famous remark 
at Dr. Blair's table, that they -were " like the wife's 
daughter in the west, — they spin the thread of their 
criticism so fine, that it is fit for neither warp nor waft." 
His Edinburgh wit often had a bitter turn to it, as he 
suppressed his rising indignation. To a lady who re- 
monstrated with him about his drinking he answered : 
" Madam, they would not thank me for my company if 
I did not drink with them. I must give them a slice 
of my constitution." 

During the years at EUisland and Dumfries Burns's 
principal poetical work consisted of songs, chiefly for 
Thomson, an Edinburgh collector, or for Johnson's 
Musical Museum. Some of the pieces were old songs 
rearranged for music ; most were original compositions. 
Burns seems to have been incapable now of sustained 
effort, but many of his best songs date from these later 
days — such songs as : Highland Mary, Bonnie Doon., 
Auld Lang Syne, Coming thro' the Rye, O my Luve 's 
like a Red, Red Rose, and that stirring battle-slogan, 
Scots wha hae wi'' Wallace bled, composed while gallop- 
ing across the wild Galloway moors in a tempest. 

In his songs rests Burns's chief fame. The world, 
now that a century has passed, is quite willing that he 
should " bear the gree ; " in his kind he stands supreme. 
And these songs, singing themselves in the man's heart, 
since they were scattered all through his life, give us 
the truest account of his nature. " He put more of him- 
self into all he wrote," says Allan Cunningham, " than 



272 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

any other poet, ancient or modern ; to which may be 
added the important corollary, amply proved in the 
songs, that he was a man of noble character — a loving, 
a humorous, a patriotic, a kindly man. The very fact 
that nearly all his biographers have zealously taken sides 
— for or against him — testifies to the infectious fire of 
his personality, even after his death. The world has 
much forgiveness ready for the man who can write with 
the mingled humor and pathos of Burns's Address to 
the Deil : — 

" ' An' now, auld Cloots, I ken ye 're thinkin', 
A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin', 
Some luckless hour will send him linkin' 

To your black pit ; 
But, faith ! he '11 turn a corner jinkin', 

An cheat you yet.' " 

Turbulent, chaotic, driven by his genius and reined 
in by his poverty, his life never wholly worked itself 
out — "a life of fragments," Carlyle has called it. Step 
aside he often did, to pluck the bright flowers by the 
way ; but if he seems to have lacked a central guiding 
principle in life, let it be remembered that it was no 
easy thing for a man with his nature and in his circum- 
stances to be sure of a fixed principle, that his very 
genius gave him no precedent on which to act. If he 
reached no clear moral manhood, let it be remembered 
that he started bravely on a new journey, while his 
countrymen remained at home. Decades ahead of his 
time, he must needs march alone, not attended, as was 
Tennyson, by the trumpets of his generation ; yet he 
reached a summit and looked into the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the promised land which he might not enter. His 
own words are his fairest epitaph : 



ROBERT BURNS 273 

" The poor inhabitant below 
Was quick to learn, and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow, 

And softer flame, 
But thoughtless follies laid him low, 

And stain'd his name ! " 



WALTER SCOTT 

"The great magician," "the wizard of the North" 
— the two names so frequently given to Scott — call to 
mind immediately his power of conjuring with the song 
and story of the past. No picture of him is complete, 
however, until he is shown as the great-hearted laird of 
Abbotsford. Among his contemporaries he was fre- 
quently surpassed in poetry ; he clearly excelled only in 
his novels. But as a man of a big, warm heart he had 
no rival, scarcely a second. He always contrived to find 
the best side of friend or enemy; he knew how to for- 
get injuries; his heart and his purse went together to 
the poor ; his dependents, his family, his friends, even 
strangers — who always found the hospitable doors of 
Abbotsford open to them — returned him affection as if 
it were his unquestionable right. Even many creditors, 
in the hour of his trial, joined the ranks of his loving 
admirers. So great, indeed, was the power of love in the 
man that generations of Scotchmen have looked to him 
with undoubting, filial affection ; and to that great 
family have long since been added thousands and tens 
of thousands wherever English is spoken or read. 

No man fills up quite so completely as Scott the 
whole period of Romanticism. Besides his work as a 
lawyer, he attained excellence and renown as an anti- 
quarian, a poet, an essayist, a historian, and a novelist. 
In studying his life it will be found convenient, though 
his humor may often demand digressive anecdote, to 
divide it into three periods ; that of his youth, education. 




In 1820. After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence, P.R. A., in the Royal Gallery, Windsor Castle 



WALTER SCOTT 275 

and poetry (1771-1814) ; that of his novels (1814- 
1826) ; and that of his noble struggle to pay off an 
enormous debt (1826-1832). 

"Walter Scott, the son of Walter Scott, a writer to 
the signet (or attorney at law), and Anne Rutherford, 
daughter of a professor in the University of Edin- 
burgh, was born in the Scotch capital, in a house at the 
head of the College Wynd, on August 15, 1771. He 
was one of twelve children ; but there was alwaj^s a 
high mortality among the Scotts, and only five of the 
children lived to maturity. " My birth," Scott says, 
" was neither distinguished nor sordid;" but "it was 
esteemed gentle.'''' One of the ancestors of whom he 
was proudest was Walter Scott of Harden, commonly 
called Auld Wat., "whose name I have made to ring 
in many a ditty." Descent from him and " his fair 
dame, the Mower of Yarrow," Scott adds, was " no bad 
genealogy for a Border Minstrel." 

Scott says he was " an uncommonly healthy child " 
at first, but when he was eighteen months old a severe 
fever so affected his right leg that he was lame for life. 
For remedy he was sent to his grandfather's place at 
Sandy-Knowe — Smailholme Grange, near " Tweed's 
fair flood." There he improved so rapidly that he was 
soon able to ride a Shetland pony over the moors. His 
lameness, indeed, did not long prevent his walking or 
his developing into a very robust, active man. The 
greatest gain from Sandy-Knowe, however, was the 
boy's early interest in Border story and song. His 
memory for some things was not remarkable, but in the 
matter of ballads to hear was to remember. He tells 
how his vigorous recitation of " Hardicanute " quite si- 
lenced a visiting clergyman, who asserted that one 



276 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

"might as well speak in a cannon's mouth as where 
that child was." 

In his fourth year Scott was taken to Bath to try the 
waters, but without material advantage. The trip to 
London, however, and the return via Prestonpans fed 
his already growing interest in history. In 1777 he was 
considered well enough to visit his parents in Edin- 
burg^h. It was at this time that Mrs. Cockburn found 
the boy reading his mother the description of a ship- 
wreck. " His passion rose with the storm," she wrote. 
" He lifted his eyes and hands. ' There 's the mast 
gone,' says he ; ' crash it goes ! — they will all perish ! ' 
After his agitation he turns to me. ' That is too mel- 
ancholy,' says he ; ' I had better read you something 
more amusing.' " On going to bed he told his aunt that 
he liked Mrs. Cockburn ; " ' for I think she is a virtuoso 
like myself.' And on his aunt's asking, ' Dear Walter, 
what is a virtuoso ? ' he answered, ' Don't ye know ? 
Why, it 's one who wishes and will know everything.' " 

In 1778 Scott was sent to the grammar school divi- 
sion of Edinburgh High School. At first he was under 
Mr. Luke Eraser, and afterwards under the Eector, 
Dr. Adam. He was a great reader, but not a very good 
scholar, though he was brilliant at times. He " glanced," 
he says, " like a meteor from one end of the class to 
the other." Lockhart gives a good illustration of the 
kind of learning which the boy possessed to a startling 
degree. On some dolt's calling cum a substantive, the 
master asked, " Is with ever a substantive ? " Scott, 
when the others had gone down before this question, 
promptly replied : " And Samson said unto Delilah, If 
they bind me with seven green withs that were never 
dried, then shall I be weak, and as another man." In 



WALTER SCOTT 277 

the Bible, ballads, and folk-lore he could already com- 
pete with all boys and many men. But he had no Greek 
and only a handy knowledge of Latin. His good hu- 
mor among his companions, his " inexhaustible " tales, 
and his generous spirit made him, he says, " a brighter 
figure in the yards than in the class.^^ " I was never a 
dunce, nor thought to be so," he adds in a footnote, 
" but an incorrigibly idle imp, who was always longing 
to do something else than what was enjoined him." As 
a narrator, a maker, he was, as Mr. Andrew Lang puts 
it, already " made." " He was a bold rider, a lover of 
nature ind of the past, he was a Jacobite, and the friend 
of epic and ballad." 

In 1785 Scott entered Edinburgh University and at 
the same time began reading law in his father's office. 
It was at this period that he became the familiar friend 
of William Clerk, the Darsie Latimer of Hedgaunt- 
let, with whom he for a while studied daily and with 
whom he became an authorized advocate in July, 1792. 
Scott, who had taken rather unwillingly to the law, 
always considered it a "dry and barren wilderness of 
forms and conveyances." He worked, however, with a 
perseverance which either belies his assertion of natural 
indolence or bears witness to heroic effort. " When actu- 
ually at the oar," he says, " no man could pull it harder 
than I, and I remember writing upwards of 120 folio 
pages with no interval either for food or rest." This 
effort is equaled only by his writing in one day, after 
his health had broken down in old age, the copy for sixty 
pages of print. During all his law studies, however, and 
his somewhat intermittent attendance at the University, 
he found time for wide and curious reading, occasional 
versification, and good fellowship. He tried his hand at 



278 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

drawing, painting, and singing, but was a rather conspic- 
uous failure. 

In appearance Scott was large and strong — "all 
rough and alive with power," says Dr. John Brown, who 
continues: "Had you met him anywhere else [than in 
Edinburgh], you would say he was a Liddesdale store- 
farmer, come of gentle blood; 'a stout, blunt carle,' as 
he says of himself, with the swing and stride and the 
eye of a man of the hills — a large, sunny, out-of-door air 
all about him." His high head, rising almost literally to 
a peak on top, later earned him the nickname of " Pev- 
eril of the Peak " among his fellow lawyers. 

How much Scott had to struggle with at this period 
is not commonly emphasized. About the second year 
of his legal apprenticeship, he says, he suffered from 
bursting a blood-vessel, and recovery was slow. In his 
nineteenth year, moreover, he fell in love with a Miss 
Margaret Stewart Belches. For five years he wor- 
shiped at her shrine, and was certainly very much 
broken by her marriage, in 1796, to William Forbes. 
Scott managed, however, to keep manfully quiet. He 
was no doubt less sensitive than Byron and Keats, but 
he was also, it must be remembered, made of sterner 
stuff. One is apt to be misled by his outward cheerful- 
ness, to forget that his optimism was won with a struggle. 
"He did not 'make copy,'" comments Mr. Andrew 
Lang, " of his deepest thoughts or of his deepest affec- 
tions." 

By 1797, however, when his heart was "handsomely 
pieced," as he expressed it, he fell in love with Miss 
Charlotte Margaret Carpenter (or Charpentier) , a lady 
of French parentage. On Christmas Eve they were mar- 
ried. The record of their long happiness and of the home 



WALTER SCOTT 279 

which they made for their children and friends is a very 
pleasant chapter. Mrs. Scott was a ministering angel 
among the neighboring poor, the children were every- 
where beloved, and the father's congeniality and hospi- 
tality would almost be famous if he had never written 
a line. No family bears scrutiny better. 

Soon after his marriage Scott moved to Lasswade, 
just outside of Edinburgh. In 1799 he was made sheriff 
depute of Selkirkshire, and five years later took up his 
abode at Ashestiel, on the Tweed, the river of his boy- 
hood and his heart. In 1806 he undertook the duties 
of a clerk of session, though he did not begin to receive 
the salary, £1300, until May, 1812. 

To cover Scott's literary work a step backwards is 
necessary. His first serious performance, remarkable 
in its choice of a romantic subject, was a translation 
of Burger's ballad, Lenore, in 1796. In 1799 he 
brought out a free translation of Goethe's Goetz von 
Berlichingen, and in 1800 he wrote the Eve of St. 
John. His first great work, however, was his Border 
Minstrelsy, a collection of old songs and ballads, 
which few were better qualified than he to assort and 
put together. Many of them, indeed, he wrote out from 
memory, for their only life had been in the mouths of 
the peasantry, from whom he had picked them up as he 
rode about the country. These ballads, with notes and 
introductions by Scott, were printed by his old school- 
fellow, James Ballantyne, in 1802. Of the Ballantynes 
much serious later. In connection with the search for 
ballads appears another of Scott's friends, John Ley- 
den, the eccentric and ingenuous scholar who in six 
weeks prepared for his medical examination for an 
Indian appointment — an effort which usually took 



280 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

several years. Lockhart tells how Ley den once went in 
search of a baUad, how, two days later, a party at din- 
ner was astonished by " a sound like that of the whis- 
tling of a tempest through the torn rigging of the vessel 
which scuds before it," and how a few minutes later 
Leyden " burst into the room chanting the desiderated 
ballad with the most enthusiastic gestures, and all the 
energy of what he used to caU the saw-tones of his 
voice." The same zeal carried the poor fellow into a 
shut-up house in India, in search of rare books, with the 
result that he caught a fatal fever. 

Scott's first popular success in literature did not 
come, however, till the publication of the Lay of the 
Last Minstrel in 1805. In spite of the faults which 
the Edinhnrgh Review of course discovered, the Lay 
had an unprecedented success. In 1808 came Mar- 
mion and secure fame. The stirring, martial swing 
of the poem, unlike anything yet written, appealed 
to nearly every one. Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh He- 
view, still found fault, but his voice sounds small. 
Scott himself, in the bewildering applause of two na- 
tions, managed to keep his head, though he admitted 
that Marmion had given him " such a heeze " 
(hoist), he had " for a moment almost lost his footing." 
When he visited London the following year (1809), 
he found his fame before him. Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, 
a friend of Scott's, well expresses in his journal the 
attitude of the author of Marmion: " 'AH this is very 
flattering,' he would say, ' and very civil ; and, if peo- 
ple are amused with hearing me tell a parcel of old 
stories, or recite a pack of ballads to lovely young girls 
and gaping matrons, they are easily pleased ; and a man 
would be very ill-natured who would not give pleasure 



WALTER SCOTT 281 

so cheaply conferred.' " Scott's good wife seems to have 
been much more agitated over his fame than Scott him- 
self. The Lady of the Lake in 1810 surpassed its 
predecessor in sale, though perhaps not in popularity. It 
is said, indeed, that so great was the interest aroused 
in the scenes of Scott's poems that the increased travel 
noticeably affected the revenue from the post-horse 
duty. To-day, when everybody travels, Stratford-on- 
Avon is about the only " literary shrine " which draws 
more visitors than the Trossachs and Loch Katrine. 

Yet poetry was only one side of " the great magi- 
cian's " literary activity. In 1808 he finished a long life 
of Dryden and in 1814 a similar work on Swift, both 
of which have outlived by their own merit most of the 
biographies written at that time. Besides them, more- 
over, Scott found time to write many sketches and short 
criticisms for magazine publication. A great man for 
exercise, he was able, nevertheless, to do without it ; a 
new kind of work, prose after poetry, he said, was suf- 
ficient " refreshment to the machine." In 1808 he gave 
willing support to the Tory Quarterly^ in opposition 
to the Whig Edinburgh Review. From boyhood Scott 
had been a king's man; he had then sided with the 
Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, he said, as King 
Charles II had chosen his religion, "because it was the 
more gentlemanlike " of the two. Gifford, however, 
proved an injudicious editor, and the Quarterly went 
the acrimonious way of the Edinburgh. 

It was in 1806 that Scott, long interested in the 
brothers Ballantyne, first put .£6000 into their printing 
establishment, and a few years later aided in the junc- 
tion of it with Constable's publishing house. Scott be- 
came a silent partner and was frequently called on to 



282 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

sustain tlie irregular, ingenuous business ways of the 
Ballantynes. As yet all went fairly well. 

Legal and social duties in these days often took 
Scott up to Edinburgh, where he lived at 39 Castle 
Street and, incidentally, did some of his writing. The 
story of Marjorie Fleming, by Dr. John Brown, is a 
delightful picture of Scott's familiar ways with chil- 
dren ; when he was tired of work, the story runs, he 
would fetch little Marjorie, aged eight, in his arms, 
Maida the dog gamboling in the snow beside him, 
carry the " wee wifee " to Castle Street, and there 
recite his lesson to that remarkable child, or listen to 
her comments on Shakespeare. The incidents of Dr, 
Brown's book may not be taken from actual fact, but 
he has ably caught the spirit of Scott. 

On the flood of his literai-y success the poet, who had 
always been eager for a large estate, bought, in 1811, 
the farm of Abbotsford, on the Tweed. There he lived 
chiefly the rest of his life. He built a large house, 
planted trees, and laid out his grounds with keen inter- 
est. In May, 1812, the family migrated from Ashestiel, 
five miles up the river. Scott wrote of the " procession 
of my furniture, in which old swords, bows, targets, 
and lances made a very conspicuous show. A family of 
turkeys was accommodated within the helmet of some 
preux chevalier of ancient border fame; and the very 
cows, for aught I know, were bearing banners and 
muskets. . . . This caravan, attended by a dozen of 
ragged, rosy peasant children, carrying fishing-rods and 
spears, and leading ponies, greyhounds, and spaniels, 
would, as it crossed the Tweed, have furnished no bad 
subject for the pencil, and really reminded me of one 
of the gipsy groups of Callot upon their march." At 



WALTER SCOTT 283 

Abbotsford Scott opened his hospitable doors to friends 
and visitors. Washington Irving tells how his host sent 
his son Walter to show him the neighboring Dryburgh 
Abbey, and then how the good-hearted " laird," insist- 
ing that what was intended for a call should be pro- 
longed to a visit, entertained him with many a merry 
tale. On the poet's wife's exclaiming, during some nar- 
ration, "Why, Mr. Scott, Macnab 's not dead, is he?" 
Scott replied, " Faith, my dear, if he 's not dead they 've 
done him great injustice — for they 've buried him I" 

There has been considerable adverse criticism of 
Scott's manner of life at Abbotsford — as if he had 
coined his literary ideals and in turn converted the coin 
into a vast accumulation of earthly things. The halls at 
Abbotsford, hung with armor and trophies of the chase, 
were, it is often said, the sign of a petty worldliness — 
a child's passion for baubles — unbecoming in a man 
who should be rearing intellectual castles. It is true 
that Scott did go in more deeply than he knew — through 
the mismanagement of the Ballantynes and through his 
own two-handed generosity ; Abbotsford was, as Mr. 
Lang says, his " private Moscow expedition." Yet even 
if his defense were not found in his last, noble struggle, 
there would still be ample justification of his actions. 
Scott lived in the spirit of the Middle Ages. To re- 
produce faithfully in word and deed the chivalry and 
pageantry of the past was his life. What more fitting 
expression of such a man could there have been than 
his Marmion^ his Ivanhoe, his Abbotsford ? The large- 
hearted gentleman took his chivalrous ideals from his 
ancestors ; and in beautifying Abbotsford, as in his 
works and in his honor to women and courtesy to 
guests, he played his part sincerely. He had, moreover, 



284 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

a not unworthy Scottish ambition to provide his pos- 
terity with a fitting ancestral estate ; he would fain have 
his descendants known as " the Scotts of Abbotsford." 

The poet's residence at Abbotsford, when he was not 
on legal duty, was, then, a full working out of his best 
self. He usually wrote for two or three hours before 
breakfast, and by noon was his " own man," as he said. 
When he did not spend the rest of the day in writing 
or entertaining guests, he went riding or shooting with 
his son or visited the Border peasantry. Among these 
simple folk the " Shirra " or the " laird," as they called 
him, was a deservedly great man. At Abbotsford, more- 
over, he was able to gratify to the full his affection for 
dogs and horses. Among the latter. Captain, Lieutenant, 
Brown Adam, and Daisy reigned up to Waterloo, as 
Mr. Hutton quaintly puts it ; while Sybil Grey and the 
Covenanter or Douce Davie filled the later period. Camp, 
Maida, and Nimrod were his favorite dogs. When Camp 
died Scott gave up a dinner party, and to Maida he 
erected a marble monument. 

Of Scott's children — Walter, Charles, Anne, and 
Sophia — none long outlived him. Sophia, however, 
from whom the line is continued to the present day, 
through adding the name of Scott to Hope, and in the 
third generation to Maxwell, married John Gibson Lock- 
hart, for twenty-seven years editor of the Quarterly 
and author of the best life of his father-in-law — indeed, 
of one of the few great biographies. 

In later years, when the press of visitors became 
thick, Scott used sometimes to escape to Lockhart's 
near-by cottage of Chiefswood. " The clatter of Sybil 
Grey's hoofs, the yelping of Mustard and Spice, and his 
own joyous shout of reveille under our windows, were 



WALTER SCOTT 285 

the signal that he had burst his toils and meant for that 
day to take his ' ease in his inn.' On descending he was 
to be found seated, with all his dogs and ours about 
him, under a spreading ash that overshadowed half the 
bank behind the cottage and the park, pointing the edge 
of his woodman's axe for himself, and listening to Tom 
Purdie's lecture touching the plantation that most needed 
thinning." 

During aU this pleasant life Scott wrote prodigiously. 
While still at Ashestiel he had published The Vision 
of Don Roderick (1811), Rokeby (1812), and The 
Bridal of Triermain (1812). Then the greater success 
of Lord Byron's Childe Harold induced him to give up 
poetry. Though he continued for some years to write 
verse, he did so with less zeal and less power than in 
the hey-day of Marmion. The Lord of the Isles (1815), 
Waterloo (1815), — for which he made a short visit to 
Belgium, — and Harold the Dauntless (1817) were his 
last long poems. In 1813 he was offered the laujreate- 
ship, but he modestly declined it, in favor of Southey. 

The eclipse of Scott by Byron in 1812 really lasted 
only two years ; for in 1814 Scott's first novel, Waverley, 
appeared. One third of it had been written nine years 
before, but the fragment had been put aside as not worth 
finishing. It was taken up for a brief moment in 1810, 
but again laid aside. One day, in 1814, while hunting 
for some fishing-tackle, Scott came across the old manu- 
script, finished it in three weeks, and, to satisfy a whim, 
published it without his name. But it did not need his 
name ; its success surpassed that of his poems. He forth- 
with followed up the popular favor with a great number 
of novels, most of which are now known to every school- 
boy. For years he persisted in concealing his connection 



286 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

with tliem, and the public spoke of tlieir author as " the 
great unknown." Guy Mannering came out in 1815, 
and was quickly followed by a succession of Scotch 
stories, — The Antiquary (1816); TJie Black Dwarf 
and Old Mortality^ in the First Series of Tales of 
My Landlord (1816) ; Roh Roy (1818) ; The Heart 
of Midlothian^ in the Second Series of Tales of My 
Landlord (1818) ; and The Bride of Lammermoor 
and The Legend of Montrose^ in the Third Series 
(1819). During the year 1819 Scott suffered much 
from intense pain in the stomach, so much so that when 
he had finished dictating The Bride of Lammermoor 
he could not remember a single incident of the story. 
" But," he later wrote, " I have no idea of these things 
preventing a man from doing what he has a mind." 

The year 1820 was a proud one for the novelist. On 
the accession of George IV he was made a baronet — 
henceforth Sir Walter. The same year, too, saw some 
of his best literary work : Ivanhoe^ The Monastery^ and 
The Abbot. By this time he was making, from his writ- 
ings alone, upwards of X10,000 a year. More significant 
still, the sale of his novels not only put poetry out of 
countenance, but so affected the mind of the reading 
public that poetry has never since been able to compete 
with prose in popularity. Lord Byron's works were still 
widely read, of course, but the rising poets, Shelley and 
Keats, were scarcely known. It is no small thing to have 
influenced the post-horse revenue by one's poetry and 
then, when no less a person than Byron has stolen one's 
fire, to write poetry out of fashion by the success of one's 
novels. 

For five years more Scott continued in his prosperous 
career. In 1821 came Kenilworth and The Pirate; in 



WALTER SCOTT 287 

1822 The Fortunes of Nigel and Halidon Hill; in 1823 
Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and St. 
JRonan's Well; in 1824: Bedgauntlet; and in 1825 The 
Bethrothed and The Talisman. The public of course 
preferred certain novels to others, but in the glamour of 
Scott's greatness all sold well, whether he kept to his 
favorite Scottish subjects, as in the earlier TFat'er^ey tales, 
or tried his hand at other themes, such as those of the 
English Tuanhoe or of the French Quentin Durward. 
In 1826, while he was working on Woodstock, the 
crash came. Sufficiently afflicted by the death of Lady 
Scott in May, he was in the same year brought low by 
the complete failure of both firms with which he was 
connected — Constable, the publisher, aud the Ballan- 
tynes, printers. The collapse was due to general mis- 
management, chiefly on the part of the Ballantyne 
brothers. Scott, a silent partner, found himseK respon- 
sible for the large debt of £117,000. With cheerful 
face he reconciled himself to giving up Abbotsford and 
set himself to the task of writing off the debt. "Nobody 
in the end can lose a penny by me," was one of the first 
things he said. " Give me my popularity," he cried, 
" and all my present difficulties shall be a joke in four 
years." He soon finished Woodstock and followed it 
in the next year (1827) with his long Life of Napo- 
leon, to study for which he made a trip to Paris. The 
novel brought him £8000 and the Life ,£18,000. Popu- 
larity was stiU his. A little reckless of his art, perhaps, 
conscious only of the duty he had set himself, he turned 
out novels with feverish haste. In 1827 appeared the 
First Series of Chronicles of the Canongate, includ- 
ing The Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, and The 
Surgeons Daughter ; in 1827-30 The Tales of a 



288 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Grandfather ; in 1828 The Fair Maid of Perth (Sec- 
ond /Series of Chronicles of the Canongate') ; and in 
1829 A7ine of Geierstein. In 1830 came the Letters on 
Demonology and TFitchcrqft. Then the strain began to 
tell; his "• magic wand," as he put it, was broken. His 
last two novels (1831) — Count Mohert of Paris and 
Castle Dangerous (^Fourth Series of Tales of My 
Landlord^ — were the weak results of his failing pow- 
ers. " The gentleman," says Lockhart, " survived the 
genius." 

Without his last effort Scott's life would have been 
merely interesting ; with it, it was sublime, one of the 
most heroic. " There was nothing in Scott," says Mr. 
Hutton, " while he remained prosperous, to relieve ade- 
quately the glare of triumphant prosperity." When, 
however, he was ready to renounce the dearest idols of 
that prosperity and to strive in his old age with the 
single idea of clearing his name from debt and of leav- 
ing his family unembarrassed, he showed a fullness 
of stature hitherto unknown. Many yoimg men have 
achieved through renunciation a noble old age, but few 
old men have been able to rise, as Scott did, superior 
to the thousand things which have become daily habit. 
Material prosperity never softened Scott. Indeed, there 
is something fine in the valuation he set on this world's 
goods — tilings to be dearly prized and accumulated while 
all went well, but to be unhesitatingly renounced when 
honor was at stake ; for to pay off the debt Scott took 
to be his only honorable course. He loved mightily his 
possessions, yet he made no show of giving them up : 
hence the greater credit. He had already revealed chiv- 
alry, courtesy, affection, and great literary skill — but 
always against no pdds. In his adversity he revealed 



WALTER SCOTT 289 

fortitude and endurance — characteristics which make 
his gentleness and tenderness all the more striking ; for 
it is only in a strong man that tenderness is admirable. 

One of the finest things in connection with the strug- 
gle was the unwillingness of friends and dependents to 
desert him. Even some of the poor offered what they# 
had. But Scott declined all help; he had resolved to 
get himself the victory with his " own right hand." His 
creditors, however, not only positively refused to ac- 
cept Abbotsford, but they insured its being left to his 
descendants. " The butler," says Lockhart, " was now 
doing half the work of the house at probably half his 
former wages. Old Peter, who had been for five and 
twenty years a dignified coachman, was now plowman 
in ordinary. . . . And all, to my view, seemed happier 
than they had even done before." "If things get round 
with me," cried Sir Walter one day, " easy shall be 
Pete's cushion ! " 

The struggle, however, was too vast and the man too 
old. In February, 1831, he had a slight stroke of pa- 
ralysis. Soon a growing weakness of both mind and body 
forbade further work. Altogether, Sir Walter had writ- 
ten off X40,000 of the debt, but at the end he was led 
by kind friends to believe that he had accomplished his 
whole task. As a matter of fact, the sale of his works 
alone did clear the whole debt, though not till fifteen 
years after his death. In vain hope of recovery he vis- 
ited Italy in the winter of 1831-32. But the news of 
Goethe's death, March 22, 1832, made him eager to get 
back to his beloved Tweed. He had said to Irving, 
years before, " If I should not see the heather at least 
once a year, I think I should die." Returned to Ab- 
botsford, he at first rallied, even thought of renewed 



290 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

labors ; but when the pen dropped from his paralyzed 
fingers, he sank back among his pillows and we|)t. 
" Friends," he said, " don't let me expose myself ; get 
me to bed — that 's the only place." After lingering for 
a few months, he died on the 21st of September, 1832, 
^nd was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, the resting-place 
of his ancestors. A few days before his death he called 
Lockhart to his bedside. " My dear," he said, " be a 
good man, — be virtuous, — be religious, — be a good 
man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you 
come to lie here." 

Whether Scott's genius falls short of that of his great 
contemporaries, such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, is a 
matter for literary discussion ; but the regularity of 
his life, instead of being certain disproof, as some in- 
geniously argue, is possibly the best evidence of great 
genius. For the perfect man might conceivably be not 
only the greatest genius, but also the person most in 
sympathy with his human surroundings ; it is often the 
incompleteness rather than the greatness of genius 
which makes it inapt to social routine. Certainly it 
must be pleasant to all (except perhaps to those who 
are determined a genius must be eccentric) that Scott 
was a man without spot or blemish in the eyes of the 
unromantic world. His life is, indeed, reassuring, a 
veritable justification of genius, and no doubt a com- 
fort, to boot, to those who would not object to a little 
genius along with their respectability. The normality 
of Scott's character, moreover, is doubly significant 
when it is remembered that he lived in the most wildly 
romantic period of English literature and that he him- 
self was " the great Romancer." His heart was in an 
idealized past ; his interest was always, as Mr, Chester- 



WALTER SCOTT 291 

ton has pointed out, not in the intricacies of impossible 
things, but in actual living — when all is said and done, 
the most romantic thing in the world. It was, indeed, 
this genuineness, this total absence of all make-believe 
in Scott, this real romantic spirit, in his life as well 
as in his work, which found him the first place in the 
hearts of his friends and readers. It is usually vsdth 
a glow of generous exaggeration that one applies to a 
man the fine tribute of Antony to the dead Brutus ; but 
in the case of Scott one is decently within bounds, one 
feels that even aged moderation would admit " the ele- 
ments so mixt " in Scott, — 

" That Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, This was a Man." 

Mr. Andrew Lang, one of his best biographers, speaks, 
at the close, of " three generations who have warmed 
their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk 
of his enchanted cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and 
been happy through his gift." 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

It is hard for people of to-day, who are used to living 
with nature and studying it, to understand fully what 
a completely new message Wordsworth brought to the 
English-speaking peoples. Until the middle of the 
eighteenth century there was almost no serious interest 
in nature, and even then, in such poets as Gray, the 
new interest was comparatively on the surface — a com- 
fortable, midsummer pleasure in gently rural things. 
Burns, in a certain sense as close to nature as any one, 
nevertheless treated it for the most part as a background. 
Cowper made indeed a great advance, and to him and 
Burns Wordsworth owed much. In all the Lake poet's 
predecessors, however, there was lacking his complete 
intimacy with nature, his loving interest in it, and espe- 
cially his religious inspiration from it. Before his day 
nature had been only a companion, if not quite an im- 
personal thing ; with him it became a prophet. Burns 
might love the " banks and braes of bonnie Doon," but 
he could not finish the poem without recalling a love 
for which " bonnie Doon " was merely a setting. Cow- 
per might love the fair broad valley of the Ouse and 
the trees about Weston Underwood, but he loved his 
seclusion more. Wordsworth, in distinction, loved ear- 
nestly and simply the mere earth about him for its 
own sake ; for the English Lakes he had the affection 
of a mediaeval mystic for the Church. And to him is 
chiefly due the interest of the nineteenth century in the 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 293 

deeper meaning of nature, an interest wMcli we to-day 
take for granted. 

An understanding of this communion of Words- 
worth's with nature is, in fact, essential in the briefest 
account of his life. For the mere facts of his existence 
— except for one dramatic moment in France — are 
uninteresting and meaningless without such an intro- 
duction. Born in the mountains of Cumberland, he re- 
turned thither when he was less than thirty and there 
lived, in almost uneventful simplicity, the remainder 
of his life. The reader who thirsts for the exploits of 
a Ralegh or the elopements of a Shelley finds little 
enough in Wordsworth. Yet this extremely simple life, 
when his communion with nature is understood, be- 
comes one of the most interesting; those who really 
care for Wordsworth love him. 

Few men, indeed, demand of the reader more initiation 
than Wordsworth does. No better method can be found 
than acquiring an intimacy with that part of England 
which meant so much to him ; a fact especially borne 
out by those who have visited the Lakes — not via 
motorbus vociferous, but on foot into the inmost re- 
cesses that he loved — down the valley of the Duddon, 
along the banks of Esthwaite Water, or up the Lang- 
dale Valley to Blea Tarn. Among the mountains and 
lakes of this region, one catches at last glimpses of the 
man's true personality. But always it is necessary to 

" Bring with you a heart 
That watches and receives." 

There is at first sight nothing very grand about the 
scenery of the Lake District, the whole of which covers 
an area of scarcely thirty miles square. The mountains 
are in fact very small. But so close together do they 



294 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

stand, so profuse is the abundance of crag and waterfall 
and lake, and so perfect are the proportions, that even 
little peaks are remarkably impressive. At every hill- 
top one is surprised by the view : a deep blue lake, a 
" beck" chattering down a gorge, ribbons of silver water- 
falls never dry on the gi-een slopes, sheep grazing among 
the gray, mist-covered crags of Helvellyn, a "tarn" 
glistening high up in a mountain hollow. In spring the 
dales are bright with flowers, and in late summer whole 
hillsides are yellow with gorse and purple with heather. 
But it is not the impressiveness so much as the almost 
human personality of the region that " takes " one most, 
a personality which grows and develops and, like a true 
friend, is inexhaustible and inspiring. Little by little 
one finds what Wordsworth found. To the visitor who 
fails to do this Wordsworth is a shut book, an inpene- 
trable mystery, not infrequently an object of derision. 

Another thing that puts the wayfarer in the Lake 
District into a Wordsworthian frame of mind is the 
human life actually there. On all sides there is an at- 
mosphere of industry and integrity, a communal spirit, 
that the merest traveler cannot fail to remark. And as 
one gi-adually becomes conscious of these things, gets to 
know the simplicity and honesty of the people, one finds, 
too, that one is getting to understand Wordsworth. 

The traveler discovers, moreover, as if a happy addi- 
tion to the original stock, a pleasant atmosphere of lit- 
erary people. The road from Coniston all the way to 
Keswick is a succession of shrines for the literary pil- 
grim. At Brantwood, on Coniston Water, Kuskin spent 
his last years ; Hawkshead, where Wordsworth went to 
school, lies quaintly at the head of Esthwaite Water ; 
Dr. Thomas Arnold built at Fox How, between Amble- 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 295 

side and Grasmere ; near-by stand the houses once 
occupied by Harriet Martineau and Felicia Hemans ; 
Hartley Coleridge lived at Nab Cottage, just below 
Rydal Mount ; and at Grasmere and Rydal are Words- 
worth's homes. Farther on, at Keswick, stands Greta 
Hall, the dwelling of Southey and Coleridge. All these 
knew and revered the poet of the Lakes. 

Cockermouth lies in the extreme northwest corner of 
the Lake District, and there, on April 7, 1770, William 
Wordsworth was born. His father was John Words- 
worth, attorney at law, and his mother, Anne Cookson. 
Of his sister Dorothy we shall see more later. Of his 
three brothers, Richard, John, and Christopher, John 
died when a young man, and Christopher lived to be 
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and father of two 
illustrious prelates, — Charles, Bishop of St. Andrew's, 
and Christopher, Head Master of Harrow, Canon of 
Westminster, and Bishop of Lincoln. 

In his boyhood Wordsworth became an orphan, his 
mother dying in 1778 and his father in 1784. He was 
left, too, in considerable poverty, but intelligent and 
generous uncles saw him through a good education. He 
was sent, in 1779, to the grammar school at Hawkshead, 
from which in October, 1787, he went up to St. John's 
College, Cambridge. 

The chief feature of Wordsworth's character is ap- 
parent from the first. While at Hawkshead, although 
he showed a serious interest in studies, he displayed 
much more a fondness for nature. Every spot about 
Esthwaite Water and Windermere was explored. He 
walked early with the rising sun, he spent hours alone 
among the hills, he led his companions in quest of the 
raven's nest. The experiences of this early period — 



296 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

what he calls the "fair seed-time of my soul" — have 
been recorded by him in the Prelude. 

" Ere I had told ten birthdays," 
he says, 

" 't was my joy 
With store of springes o'er my shoulder hung 
To range the open heights where woodcocks run 
Along the smooth green turf." 

He saw in nature 

" Gleams, like the flashings of a shield," 
and 

" the earth 
And common face of nature spake to him 
Rememberable things." 

He tells, too, how he would sometimes turn aside from 
his fellow-skaters 

" To cut across the reflex of a star 
That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed 
Upon the glassy plain." 

Of all these boyhood experiences perhaps the most 

significant was the vision of the " huge peak, black 

and huge," — the top of Wetherlam, — that seemed to 

stride after him as he rowed across Esthwaite Water. 

" Huge and mighty forms, that do not live 
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind 
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams." 

From then on he was a consecrated priest of nature. 
And as such he considered himself ; " not in vain," he 
says to the Spirit of the Universe, — 

" By day or star light thus from my first dawn 
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
The passions that build up the human soul ; 
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man. 
But with high objects, with enduring things, — 
With life and nature — purifying thus 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 297 

The elements of feeling and of thought, 
And sanctifying, by such discipline, 
Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart." 

" I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit." 

Wordsworth as a boy was perhaps too kindly dis- 
posed to be called austere ; he had, however, a Miltonic 
seriousness from the first. There was plenty of joyous- 
ness in him, but little mirth, just as in the man there 
was positively no humor. Yet it is a great error to 
inter, as many have done from the calmness of his 
writings, that he was a youth of little passion. His 
nature was particularly sensitive and excitable, and the 
calmness of later years was, as Mr. Myers has pointed 
out, rather the result of a deliberate philosophy than of 
coldness of temperament. 

Cambridge did not have the transforming power 
over Wordsworth that one might have expected. Just 
at the close of the eighteenth century the old university 
was peacefully asleep, and the poet drifted quietly 
through its meditative atmosphere without any striking 
experiences. The hold of his earlier life was strong 
enough still to possess him, and he went forth, some- 
thing more of a scholar, but still the Hawkshead boy, 
unsophisticated in the ways of men and ignorant of 
the great revolution that was transforming Europe, He 
did not understand the language of these new things 
— that was all. His noble and sensitive nature must 
otherwise have responded instantly — as it later did — 
to the message of France ; the Revolution as yet spoke 
no prophecy to him. 



298 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

He took the degree of B. A. in January, 1791, and 
■witli no settled occupation went to London. But for 
him London, too, had at first no message. Before he 
could grow up, before he could humanize his interest 
in nature, he must undergo an experience. The intri- 
cate, passionate life of a great city which meant so much 
to a man like Browning made only an external im- 
pression on Wordsworth. In November of the same 
year he went to France. There the Revolution was 
raging, but he passed through Paris almost unmoved. 
As Dr. Hancock has put it, he was like one coming 
late to a theatre ; he failed to get the trend of the plot. 

Finally at Orleans a transformation took place. 
There Wordsworth met the nobly -born republican 
general, Beaupuis. At first the ardor of Beaupuis did 
not appeal to him. One day, however, when they were 
walldng together, the general pointed out a little girl 
leading a heifer, a type of the half-starved humanity 
ground down by the heel of the aristocracy. " It is for 
that," said Beaupuis, " that we are fighting." Immedi- 
ately Wordsworth saw. From that moment his sym- 
pathy for the republican cause became a passion. 

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven ! " 

he cried. He was eager even to throw in his lot with 
that of the republicans and to take up arms. Fortu- 
nately for him, however, friends called him back to 
England just as war between the two countries was 
imminent. But he had had his experience. He was a 
changed man. 

Such a soul-searching ordeal was nevertheless not to 
be lightly passed through. When the young Republic 
and England came to war, when Wordsworth found all 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 299 

his fair hopes trailed in the mud by the new power 
without even the dignity of antiquity, he was thrown 
almost into despair. His eyes had been opened and he 
had beheld a nightmare. Nor did London, big, brutal, 
throbbing with intensest life, make the problem less 
complex ; to take his puzzle there was like taking nitro- 
glycerine into a powder-magazine. It was impossible 
to return now to the childish faith ; it was equally im- 
possible to live with the nightmare. 

After nearly two years of this confusion and despair 
Wordsworth found a twofold cure. The first was in 
intelligent thought ; he turned instinctively to the phi- 
losophy of the movement. For a while the only logical 
plan seemed to be to follow William Godwin's theories, 
which asserted that reason was the sole guide. But cold 
reason in the light of facts had been as disastrous a 
leader as the undisciplined enthusiasm of Kousseau, 
who said that man should follow his simple, primitive 
instincts, that is, " return to nature ; " the scheme in 
France had simply not worked. To a man of Words- 
worth's sensitive, idealistic temperament, moreover, the 
harsh materialism which Godwin's doctrines implied 
was particularly distasteful. There were " strange mis- 
givings " of the soul which it could in no way answer ; 
there were higher instincts, elemental forebodings of 
a God and of a truth which veritably "passeth human 
understanding." Godwinism, pushed to its logical ex- 
treme by a man for whom the sky and the stars and 
the morning sun had any message, was absurd; and 
Wordsworth naturally fell back on nature, the firm, 
tried friend of his youth. In no merely figurative sense 
did he lift up his eyes unto the hills from whence came 
his help. 



.300 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The other and far greater cure was found in the 
companionship of his sister Dorothy. In 1795 she came 
to live with him, and together they took a little house 
at Racedown, in Dorset. A fortunate bequest of <£900 
from a friend, Raisley Calvert, who died in 1795, and 
,£1000 from his father's estate made it possible for 
Wordsworth to give himself up wholly to poetry. Here, 
under the influence of simple nature and his sister's 
loving sympathy, he again saw clearly. Those who 
think, however, that he regained his old boyhood faith 
miss the whole development of the mail ; he rather ac- 
quired a new faith — the stronger, surer faith of a 
grown man, founded indeed on the imperishable revela- 
tions of his youth, but strengthened by a new interest 
in mankind. The conflict, to use an excellent, well- 
worn expression, had humanized him. Nature now car- 
ried a new, a fuller, a deeper meaning. " For I have 
learned," he says, 

" To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth ; but hearing oftentimes 
The still sad music of humanity, 
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
And the round ocean and the living air. 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, 
And rolls through all things." 

These lines, written on July 13, 1798, a few miles 

above Tintern Abbey, amount to a confession of faith. 

During the next fifteen years, in fact, Wordsworth's 

best poetry was written. He had published as early as 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 301 

1792 two poems, The Evening Walk and Descriptive 
Sketches, which attracted the attention of young Cole- 
ridge. At Racedown he finished Guilt and Sorroiv and 
wrote a tragedy, The Borderers, and a poem called The 
Ruined Cottage, which he later inserted in The Excur- 
sion. In 1797 he and his sister moved to Alfoxden, not 
far from Nether-Stowey, in order to be near Coleridge, 
with whom he had developed a warm friendship. The 
next year appeared The Lyrical Ballads, started con- 
jointly by the two poets to defray the expenses of a 
walking tour, but finally expanded into a volume. This 
book, which included TJie Ancient Mariner, almost 
wholly by Coleridge, and Wordsworth's Lines Written 
above Tintern Abbey, brought both writers into con- 
siderable notice, not only because of the admitted ex- 
cellence of some of the poems, but because of such trivial 
pieces as The Ldiot Boy and because of the preface's 
expounding a new theory of poetry, — that any topic, 
however homely, if taken from " real life," might be a 
poetic topic. 

Wordsworth and his sister spent the following winter 
at Goslar, in Germany. Ruth, Nntting, A Poet's Epi- 
taph, and Lucy Gray were written there, and The 
Prelude, an introduction to the long projected poem 
of TJie Recluse, was planned. The Prelude, dedicated 
to Coleridge, was not finished tiU 1805, and not pub- 
lished till after Wordsworth's death. The Lucy Gray 
poems, about which Wordsworth was singularly reticent, 
suggest by their earnest emotion some very real attach- 
ment. It has been remarked that it is ungenerous to 
inquire further ; it may be added that it is now also 
futile. Lucy Gray may after aU have been only a 
type of various youthful idealizations of women rather 



302 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

than a single person ; still, there are some who, con- 
vinced of her individuality, will search for her as men 
still seek the " dark lady " of Shakespeare's sonnets. 

In December, 1799, when Wordsworth was just 
under thirty years old, he returned to the Lakes, never 
again to leave them for any great length of time. For 
the first thirteen years of the century, except for a tour 
in Scotland and a visit to Coleorton Hall, in Leicester- 
shire, he lived in or near Grasmere. His first residence 
there, with his sister, at Dove Cottage, has become one 
of the most interesting of all literary shrines. It is a 
pity, however, that the memorials are so exclusively to 
the Wordsworths, for their successor, De Quincey, is 
just as closely associated with the house. It is a little 
white cottage, perched against a hillside, with the back 
garden right under the second-floor windows, and with 
diminutive, irregular, low-ceiled rooms. 

It must have been a memorable experience to have 
visited Wordsworth there. His closest friends and most 
frequent visitors were Coleridge and Southey, who lived 
at Keswick. On a rock at the end of Thirlmere, just 
half way between Grasmere and Keswick, are cut sig- 
nificant initials — W. W., S. T. C, D. W., and M. 
H. This rock, fragments of which are now pathetically 
preserved in a cairn piled just beyond the straining- 
well of its destroyer, the Manchester Water Company, 
was their favorite meeting-place. 

The initials M. H. stood for Mary Hutchinson, of 
Penrith, to whom Wordsworth became engaged in 1800. 
Two years later the marriage took place. It came just 
at the flood-tide of his spiritual prosperity, when in his 
greatest vigor and clearness of mind he was writing 
down those records of his new and larger faith, when he 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 303 

had just returned with a whole heart to the hills. Mary- 
Wordsworth has, to be sure, been eclipsed in the mind 
of posterity by the more sensitive, more expressive Dor- 
othy ; but she was no less than Dorothy his constant 
companion and inspiration ; — and something of a poet, 
too : it was she, in fact, who suggested the two most fa- 
mous hnes of that famous poem, The Daffodils^ — 

" They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude." 

In 1808 the growing family moved to Allan Bank, 
at the other end of the town. Three years were spent 
there, two more in the parsonage at Grasmere, and then, 
in 1813, the poet took up his last residence, at Eydal 
Mount, overlooking Rydal Water and commanding a 
fine view of distant Windermere. Here for thirty-seven 
years he lived his simple life, writing considerably, 
caring for his sister Dorothy, now become an invalid, 
laying out his garden and planting his trees, and walk- 
ing with his friends and children among his well-loved 
hiUs. 

In his later years Wordsworth was much visited by 
men of letters and admirers, to whom he had an ingen- 
uous way of quoting only his own poetry. " Gradually 
it became apparent to me," says Carlyle, " that of tran- 
scendent unlimited there was, to this critic, probably but 
one specimen known, Wordsworth himself ! " Some- 
times the old poet went up to London, but except for 
his fascinating eye and an occasional flow of language 
he was not attractive to even literary London. Few 
men have been so wholly without humor. Dickens is 
reported to have said of him, " Dreadful old bore ! " — 
a remark, it may be added, that reveals the limitations 
of Dickens as well as of Wordsworth. Carlyle was 



304 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

almost as impatient of him, his monotonous remarks, his 
feeble handshake, and called him a " small " though 
" genuine " man, but did, in one or two phrases, strike 
off a memorable picture of the old bard. " A man 
recognizably of strong intellectual powers, strong char- 
acter," the Scotchman says ; " given to meditation, and 
much contemptuous of the unmeditative world and its 
noisy nothingnesses ; had a fine limpid style of writing 
and delineating, in his small way ; a fine limpid vein of 
melody too in him (as of an honest rustic fiddle, good, 
and weU-handled, but wanting two or more of the strings, 
and not capable of much !)." Once Carlyle, in a dis- 
cussion with Sterling, made some remarks, which he 
thought would " perhaps please Wordsworth too," who 
sat " almost next to me," but who " gave not the least sign 
of that or any other feeling." Carlyle thus describes 
him : " The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had 
a quiet clearness ; there was enough of brow and well- 
shaped ; rather too much of cheek (' horse face ' I have 
heard satirists say) ; face of squarish shape and de- 
cidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its 
'length' going horizontal); he was large-boned, lean, 
but still firm-knit, tall and strong-looking when he stood, 
a right good old steel-gray figure, with rustic simpli- 
city and dignity about him." To do Wordsworth jus- 
tice, allowance must be made for his great age (about 
seventy) when Carlyle saw him, and for the grotesque 
himaor and occasional spleen of the limner. One more 
glimpse, from Carlyle, cannot well be omitted, for its 
own sake as well as for the picture of the poet : " I 
look upwards, leftwards " (during dessert at a large 
dinner-party), "the coast being luckily for a moment 
clear; then, far off, beautifully screened in the shadow 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 305 

of his vertical green shade, which was on the farther 
side of him, sat Wordsworth, silent, slowly but steadily 
gnawing some portion of what I judged to be raisins, 
with his eye and attention placidly fixed on these and 
these alone. The sight of whom, and of his rock-like 
indifference to the babble, quasi-scientific and other, 
with attention turned on the small practical alone, was 
comfortable and amusing to me, who felt like him but 
could not eat raisins." 

The dining and the visitors, however, made up in 
reality a very minor feature of Wordsworth's life. At 
Rydal he lived in great simplicity. He was indeed never 
well ojBf, for his poetry brought no addition to his slender 
income. In 1802 he received .£1800 as his share of an 
old family debt then paid; and ten years later he was 
appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, with 
,£400 a year. On his resigning this position in 1842, 
Sir Robert Peel managed to get him a pension of £300 
from the civil list. In 1827, moreover. Sir George 
Beaumont had begun his annual gift of £100 for a trip 
to Scotland. 

Of the poems written between the Lyrical Ballads 
(1798) and Wordsworth's death (1850), a division, as 
has been suggested, can be conveniently made. For ten 
or fifteen years he was filled with the full inspiration 
of his message. After Tintern Abbey came many of his 
best lyrics — such as To the Cuckoo, My Heart leaps up^ 
To the Daisy, She was a Phantom of Delight, I Wan- 
dered Lonely as a Cloud, — the song which a heart, so 
full as the lines written above Tintern prove his to have 
been, spontaneously gave forth. Many of his sonnets, 
too, — especially the patriotic ones in 1802 and 1803, 
— were composed in this his best period. Of his shorter 



306 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

narrative poems written at this time Michael, Resolution 
and Independence, The Brothers, and Margaret are the 
best known. In 1805 the Ode to Duty was written and 
in 1806 the Ode on Intimations of Immortality was 
finished. The White Doe of Hy I stone helongs to the 
year 1808; Daodamia and Dion were both done in 
1814, the year which may best be taken as the begin- 
ning of the second division. In this year was finished 
the Excursion, his longest poem, the second part of the 
projected Recluse, of which the Prelude had been made 
an introduction. The Excursion, like the Prelude, is 
a naive statement in blank verse of his experiences and 
his philosophy, and to it we are indebted for much 
autobiography. 

Even more important than the Excursion, in, study- 
ing Wordsworth's life, is the great Ode on Intiniations 
of Immortality. At first he states the theory that the 
boy, coming " from God, who is our home," is more 
wholly spiritual than the man ; then that the man, under 
the influence of material surroundings, daily must travel 
farther from the east, gradually grows away from spirit- 
ual things, loses the divine presence which in the boy 
" is not to be put by," comes at last to 

" Forget the glories he hath known, 
And that imperial palace whence he came." 

If Wordsworth had stoj)ped here, the philosophy of 
the poem would be dreary enough and incompatible with 
his other work ; it would have to be regarded as a freak, 
the offspring of a despondent mood. But he saves him- 
self by contradicting himself, by saying that in us is 
" something that doth live," a " shadowy recollection " 
of the childhood glory. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 307 

" Hence, in a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither." 

There still exists that 

"primal sympathy 
Which having been must ever be." 

" The innocent brightness of a new-born day 
Is lovely yet ; 
The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 

Is not here a complete record of his childish idealism, 
of his period of conflict and despair, and of his matur- 
ity that brought back the idealism tempered and tried 
and infused with a love for man ? He could finally say, 
at the end of the poem, — 

" To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

On account of this soberer faith that came with 
*' years that bring the philosophic mind," because of his 
recanting from the wilder principles of the French 
Revolution, Wordsworth was accused by some of desert- 
ing the cause. Browning's Lost Leader, which the au- 
thor himself would not admit to be the " very effigies " of 
Wordsworth, has been no doubt responsible for an ac- 
cusation so false. Wordsworth's change was the natural 
result of maturity. Coleridge, too, recanted. All his 
great contemporaries did so, in fact, except Byron and 
Shelley, who were both constitutionally unable to put 
up with social laws. It is ridiculous to think that Words- 
worth ever deserted for " a handful of silver " or for 



308 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

" a riband to stick in his coat ; " and of course Brown- 
ing never meant that directly of hhn. 

Until his death Wordsworth continued to write much. 
Among the great mass of indifferent poems in this sec- 
ond period (1814-50) there shine out The Duddon 
Sonnets (1820) ; one or two odes, such as that To a 
Skylark, beginning " Ethereal minstrel" (1825) ; and 
Yarrow Revisited (1831). During the years 1821-22 
he wrote a great quantity of sonnets collected under the 
title Ecclesiastical Sonnets^ and during a trip to Italy 
in 1837 he composed several poems included under the 
title Memorials of a Tour in Italy. In 1829-30 he 
spent much time over a translation of part of the jEneid. 
At this time, too, he wrote considerable prose, the most 
interesting of which is his description of the Scenery of 
the Lakes (1822). His magnum opus. The Recluse, 
was never finished. Of the- three books planned, the 
first, called Home at Grasmere, — to go between The 
Prelude and The Excursion, — was published in 1888. 
A large part of what was intended for the third book 
is scattered among other poems. A fitting recognition 
finally accorded him came in the appointment to the 
post of poet-laureate, left vacant by the death of Southey 
in 1843. 

Wordsworth's last days were very tranquil. At the 
age of eighty, after taking a cold which developed 
pleurisy, he died quietly at noon, on April 23, 1850. 
His grave was put between those of his sister Dorothy 
and his daughter Dora in Grasmere Churchyard, and 
to these was added, nine years later, that of his wife. 

In spite of the laureateship and of his great age, the 
poet did not win very wide recognition till years after 
his death. There was not enough of the spectacular in 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 309 

him to storm popular citadels, when Scott, Coleridge, 
and Byron were claiming attention. And immediately 
after his death Tennyson, with a more universal voice, 
held the ear of England. It was necessary, moreover, 
for the world, under the guidance of such excellent 
interpreters as Matthew Arnold, to grow to a compre- 
hension of his meaning. There is in him a splendid 
spiritual power, an imperishable word to those who will 
truly listen. 

" He is retired as noontide dew, 
Or fountain in a noonday grove : 
And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love. 

*' The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed; 
And impulses of deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude. 

" In common things that round us lie 
Some random truths he can impart; — 
The harvest of a quiet eye 
That broods and sleeps on his own heart." 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

" As to my shape," Coleridge said in a letter describ- 
ing himseK, " 't is a good shape enough, if measured — 
but my gait is awkward, and the walk of the whole man 
indicates indolence capahle of energies.^' Here are 
expressed the two most striking things about Coleridge : 
he was a very capable man, and he somehow usually 
failed to achieve the results he promised. He was one 
of the keenest critics of his time, he was a widely versed 
scholar, and he had a poetic skill rarely surpassed. 
Nor did he fail for want of divine fire ; back of his 
scholarship and skill lay an especially bright genius. 
But physical irresolution possessed him from the first ; 
he fell into indolence and then into opium-eating; 
and from a condition where he saw the bright visions 
of youth pass unrecorded, he sank rapidly to a condi- 
tion where the visions grew feebler and more indistinct. 
As if to make his life more tragic, his reason remained 
good to the end ; he saw clearly the awful penalty he 
was paying. There is something very sad. in the humor 
of Lamb, in writing of Coleridge in 1810 : " Coleridge 
has powdered his hair, and looks like Bacchus, Bacchus 
ever sleek and young. He is going to turn sober, but his 
clock has not struck yet." As early as 1794, when he 
was only twenty-two, Coleridge saw and expressed the 
tragedy of his life : — 

" Sloth-jaundiced all ! and from my graspless hand 
Drop Friendship's precious pearls, like hour-glass sand." 

Yet in spite of this curse of irresolution, Coleridge 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 311 

did manage, because of a very great genius within him, 
to write a little great prose and poetry. Most of his 
work, however, is unfinished — as his whole life was. 
On this account people to-day are prone to underestimate 
his genius. It must have been necessary to know the 
man, to hear him talk, to see his eye, if one would com- 
prehend his real magnitude. For in discourse, which 
does not require the resolute girding up of loins that 
writing does, he was at his best. Among his con- 
temporaries he would have been the undisputed suc- 
cessor of Dr. Johnson — if such a dictator had been 
possible after the French Revolution. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen 
children, was born October 21, 1772, at Ottery- 
St. Mary's in Devonshire. His father, the Rev. John 
Coleridge, was vicar of the village and a schoolmaster. 
His mother, John Coleridge's second wife, was Anne 
Bowdon. So many poets are spoken of as precocious in 
boyhood that a superlative is necessary in Coleridge's 
case. No great writer of the nineteenth century, except 
the marvelous Macaulay, was so precocious a child. 
He mixed little, he says, with other boys, but spent most 
of his time reading '' incessantly " or acting out what 
he had read. " And I used to lie by the wall and mope ; 
and my spirits used to come upon me sudden, in a flood ; 
and then I was accustomed to run up and down the 
churchyard and act over again all I had been reading, 
to the docks and the nettles and the rank grass." The 
Rev. John, fearing the effect of fairy tales on the ima- 
ginative infant, burned the child's books. " So," he goes 
on, " I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposi- 
tion to all bodly activity. I was fretful and inordinately 
passionate ; . . . despised and hated by the boys . . . 



312 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and flattered and wondered at by all the old women. 
And before I was eight years old I was a character.''^ 
These are important words ; they show in the child the 
man almost completely foreshadowed : the flashing-, 
imaginative mind, the great learning, the irresolution, 
the disaster, and Coleridge the character. For of all his 
great contemporaries only Shelley can compete with him 
in strangeness of ways. 

Such a boy, as may be imagined, was an odd figure 
at school. He was at a dame school from three to six, 
and at his father's grammar school from six to nine. 
Then his father died, and with him even a meagre finan- 
cial support. Through Mr. Francis Buller, however, an 
appointment to Christ Hospital School in London was 
obtained, and on July 18, 1782, Coleridge became a 
blue-coat boy. The first six weeks were spent in the 
Junior School at Hertford, but in September he was 
removed to the Under Grammar-School in London and 
initiated into the mysteries of " milk porritch, blue and 
tasteless," and " pease soup, coarse and choking." 
"Come back into my memory," writes his schoolfellow 
Charles Lamb in Christ^s Hospital Five and Thirty 
Years Ago, " like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy 
fancies, with hope like a fiery colunm before thee — 
the dark pillar not yet turned — Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge — Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! — How have 
I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, 
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the dis- 
proportion between the speech and the garh of the 
young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and 
sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plo- 
tinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at 
such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 313 

Greek, or Pindar — while the walls of the old Grey- 
Friars reechoed to the accents of the inspired charity 
hoy ! " Lamb tells, too, of the hot summer nights when 
Coleridge gazed from the roof at the stars, and of the 
whole holidays when they roamed the fields about Lon- 
don or went to see the grim sights of the Tower ; and 
he recounts, with incomparable drollery, the doings of 
the Head Master, the Rev. James Boyer, with his " Ods 
my life, sirrah ! I have a great mind to whip you ! " 
When, years afterwards, Coleridge heard that this rig- 
orous teacher was on his death-bed, he remarked: " Poor 
J. B. ! May all his faults be forgiven, and may he be 
wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all heads and 
wings, with no hottoms to reproach his sublunary in- 
firmities." 

Coleridge was a brilliant if wayward scholar, and he 
won easily a Christ Hospital " Exhibition " Scholarship 
at Jesus College, Cambridge, which he entered in the 
fall of 1791. He passed most of his time there tiU 1794, 
but his attendance was irregular and he never took a 
degree. He was of course in the forefront of those in- 
terested in the Revolution, and his rooms soon became 
a centre for youthful philosophers, poets, and champions 
of liberal views. A minute of a Literary Society is 
doubly significant : " Time before supper was spent in 
hearing Coleridge repeat some original poetry (he hav- 
ing neglected to write his essay, which is therefore to 
be produced next week)." First, it is evident that his 
verse was already a matter for admiration among his 
friends; indeed, he had already written (1793), besides 
many imitations and pieces of little merit, his Lines 
on an Autumnal Evening, and his poem To Fortune 
had just appeared in the Morning Chronicle. Second, 



314 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

it is plain that he had already begun to neglect things ; 
and there is no record that " next week " ever came for 
that essay. 

Coleridge's longest absence from Cambridge was dur- 
ing the winter of 1793-94, when he enlisted as Silas 
Tomkyn Comberbach in the 15th Regiment of Light 
Dragoons. This sudden departure was brought on by 
debts and despondency. He made a very sorry horseman, 
but he managed by writing love-letters for his comrades 
to get his horse and accoutrements cleaned for him. In 
two months, however, he had had enough ; by April, 
1794, his discharge was procured; and after being ad- 
monished, he was reinstated by the Master of Jesus 
College. 

The following summer and fall brought two impor- 
tant events into Coleridge's life — Pantisocracy and his 
love affair with Mary Evans. The first was a scheme 
concocted by Southey, Coleridge, Burnett, and Lovell — 
a plan born of the socialistic dreams that the French 
Revolution inspired in youthful minds. Briefly stated, 
" Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal prin- 
ciples are to embark with twelve ladies in April next" 
for some " delightful part of the new back settlements " 
of America. The banks of the Susquehanna were the 
chosen spot. Here all were to enjoy the fruits of the 
soil and freedom of thought and action, out of which, 
they somehow imagined, was to arise a sort of Utopian 
blessedness. But the expedition never started, because 
at first funds were lacking, to supply which Coleridge 
and Southey took ardently to writing and to lecturing 
at Bristol, and because later there were disagreements, 
and ardor cooled. 

Coleridge's love for Mary Evans seems to have been 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 315 

long-standing and sincere — deeper in fact than any af- 
fection he later felt. In the summer of 1794, with his 
head full of Pantisocracy, he had, to be sure, paid court 
to Sarah Fricker, sister of Southey's betrothed. But the 
following winter his love for Mary Evans returned and 
he rallied a forlorn hope in a letter of direct proposal. 
She refused him, however ; yet his quiet manner of ac- 
cepting the conditions, so far as his letter of reply is 
any indication, was very creditable. 

Cambridge was become, as might be expected, a place 
of slight charm for him, and about the middle of De- 
cember, 1794, he left it for good. The winter was 
spent in unsettled life in London, where his work was 
chiefly writing sonnets for the Morning Chronicle. It 
was at this time that he passed those rare evenings with 
Charles Lamb at " The Salutation." " Those were days 
(or nights)," said Lamb, "but they were marked with 
a white stone. Such were his extraordinary powers, 
that when it was time for him to go and be married, 
the landlord entreated him to stay, and offered him 
free quarters if he would only talk." 

Coleridge evidently did feel it was time to go and be 
married. And so — Mar}^ Evans failing — he renewed 
suit with unbecoming haste to Sarah Fricker. He was 
at Bristol with Southey early in 1795, and more lec- 
tures and Pantisocracy followed. On the 4th of Octo- 
ber of the same year he was married to Miss Fricker 
and moved into a cottage at Clevedon near the Somer- 
set coast. 

Among the literary results of the life in the West 
were the publication of Rohespierre in 1794, a play 
written conjointly by Coleridge and Southey, and the 
acquaintance with Amos Cottle, a bookseller who in- 



316 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

spired Byron's " PhcEbus ! What a name !" In March, 
1796, Cottle brought out Coleridge's Poems on Vari- 
ous /Subjects, which included most of his earlier verse 
and Religious Musings. 

At the suggestion of friends enthusiastic over Cole- 
ridge's liberal views, the poet made a tour of the North 
to secure subscriptions for his proposed periodical. 
The Watchman. He preached by the way, he says, 
" as a hireless volunteer, in a blue coat and white waist- 
coat, that not a rag of the woman of Babylon might 
be seen on me. For I was at that time and long after 
... a zealous Unitarian in religion." He returned 
with nearly a thousand names, and The Watchman 
appeared on March 1, 1796. But it came to a speedy 
death with the tenth issue on May 13. " The reason 
is short and satisfactory," says the "Address to the 
Reader:" " the work does not pay its expenses." 

During the following autumn Coleridge first touched 
opium. He had been suffering from depression and 
neuralgia, and on the 3d of November he took " be- 
tween 60 and 70 drops of laudanum," he wrote to his 
friend Poole, " and sopped the Cerberus just as his 
mouth began to open." True, it was some years before 
taking opium became a habit, but he had now learned 
the terrible cure, to which he so helplessly turned when 
other ills combined with bodily to tempt him. 

There followed on this period of depression, never- 
theless, the brightest and most productive days of Cole- 
• ridge's life. The best part of his friendship with 
Wordsworth, his greatest poetic work, and his most 
conspicuous growth all belong to the next five years. 
After 1802 domestic difficulties, estrangement from 
friends, shiftless and injurious habits, and the loss of 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 317 

his poetic gift crowded ruin upon him; he was never 
again quite his own man. But in 1797, when he and 
Mrs. Coleridge moved with their infant Hartley to a 
house at Stowey, he was still rising to greatness. 

Coleridge first met Wordsworth in June, 1797, when 
the latter was living with his sister Dorothy at Race- 
down, in Dorset. A close friendship at once possessed 
all three. Wordsworth was in Coleridge's eyes the 
noblest man alive — the only man to whom he always 
granted superiority. There was, on the other hand, a 
fire and a fascination about the young preacher and 
poet of Stowey which took the Wordsworths completely? 
which brought them indeed to Alfoxden, near Stowey, 
to live. Dorothy Wordsworth thus describes Cole- 
ridge : " He is a wonderful man. His conversation 
teems with soul, mind, and spirit. . . . At first I 
thought him very plain, that is for about three min- 
utes : he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and 
not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, half-curling 
rough black hair. But if you hear him speak for five 
minutes, you think no more of them. His eye is large 
and full, and not very dark, but gray — such an eye as 
would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression ; 
but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it 
has more of ' the poet's eye in fine frenzy rolling ' than 
I ever witnessed." And Coleridge, in describing him- 
self to Thelwall, says : " As to me, my face, unless ani- 
mated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, 
and great, indeed almost idiotic, good nature. 'T is a 
mere carcase of a face : fat, flabby, and expressive 
chiefly of inexpression. ... I cannot breathe through 
my nose, so my mouth with sensual thick lips is almost 
always open." 



t 



318 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

But before the great production which resulted from 
the friendship with Wordsworth, the second edition of 
Coleridge's poems was published in the summer of 
1797. In the same volume were verses by Charles 
Lamb, his friend of school-days, and by Charles Lloyd, 
a sensitive, melancholy youth who had been living as 
a kind of disciple with Coleridge. Soon after this 
Coleridge quarreled with Lloyd, and as a result was 
estranged for a time from Lamb. During the same 
summer Sheridan asked Coleridge to write a play for 
Drury Lane, and by October Osorio was finished. 
It was then rejected, but came up successfully sixteen 
years later in the rewritten JRemorse. 

Coleridge's greatest achievement, The Ancient Mar- 
iner, which alone would insure his position as a very 
great poet, was the first fruit of the friendship with 
Wordsworth. In November, 1797, the three friends 
went on a walking tour through North Devon, and to 
defray expenses hit on writing a joint poem. Coleridge 
rapidly sketched a plan and soon took to himself the 
greater part of the work. The poem, still unfinished, 
was not sent to the Monthly Magazine as proposed, 
but "grew and grew," says Wordsworth. Finally, on 
the 23d of the following March, Coleridge went to dine 
at Alfoxden and took with him the finished ballad — 
" inimitable," as he himself called it. The poem, for 
some time very unpopular, but now among the best 
known in the language, was published as part of Cole- 
ridge's small contribution to the Lyrical Ballads, 
brought out by the two poets in September, 1798. 

The spirit of poetry was indeed on Coleridge as never 
before or since. In 1797 he began Christahel, like 
most of his work never finished, and the following year 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 319 

he contributed to the Morning Post some of his 
best work, — the Ode to France^ Frost at Midnight^ 
and Fears in Solitude. Coleridge, who had been, as 
Wordsworth, an enthusiastic champion of the French 
Revolution, had now recanted, as had his friend, when 
he saw France — 

" Mix with kings in the low lust of sway, 
Yell in the bunt, and share the murderous prey." 

In April of the same year the quarrel with Lloyd had 
driven the dejected Coleridge to " a lonely farmhouse 
between Porlock and Linton." There he had recourse 
to an " anodyne." One of the results was another link 
in the chain of the habit about to possess him inex- 
orably ; the other result was Kuhla Khan. For Cole- 
ridge dreamed a whole poem and proceeded, on awaking 
from the opium dream, to write it down. When, how- 
ever, he had written fifty-four lines he was called out 
on business, and later the marvelous vision had fled. 
Yet there remains the perfect fragment. 

Professor Brandl has pointed out how common 
melancholia, depression, and overwrought imagination 
were among writers at the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury; how common indeed was the opium cure. The 
lives of Dr. Johnson, Collins, Fergusson, Burns, Cow- 
per, Blake, Coleridge, Lamb, Lloyd, De Quincey, By- 
ron, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Keats (not to mention 
minor authors) — all were touched by a haunting sad- 
ness. Of these De Quincey and Coleridge were con- 
spicuous as opium-eaters ; but one feels that almost any 
of these men, by the slightest twisting of the threads 
of life, might have shared a similar fate. To-day such 
a list would read like a catalogue of degenerates; but 
one must not judge too harshly of men whom imagina- 



320 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

tion possessed at times as a nightmare. It is indeed 
to the great credit of many that they waved back so 
bravely the insidious comfort. 

To return to Coleridge in 1798. He had now become 
a considerable figure. Nearly every Sunday he preached 
in Unitarian chapels, drawing by his ardor and elo- 
quence many young men. How miarvelously he talked 
may be guessed from the admiration of young William 
Hazlitt, who heard him preach in Shrewsbury : " The 
preacher then launched into his subject like an eagle 
dallying with the wind." 

In the fall of this year, just as the Lyrical Ballads 
were coming out, he joined the Wordsworths in a trip 
to Germany, with the purpose of getting the language 
and the philosophy of that country. On reaching the 
continent, the Wordsworths went to Goslar for a dismal 
winter; Coleridge to Ratzeburg to learn the language. 
Early in 1799 he moved to Gottingen, and there, at 
the university, worked "harder than, I trust in God 
Almighty, I shall ever have occasion to work again." 
He became a great student of German metaphysics — 
in fact, was largely responsible for introducing them to 
the English. He always, however, spoke German with 
an "abominable accent," and referred constantly, it 
is said, to a pocket-dictionary. After a walking tour 
through the Harz Mountains he returned to Stowey in 
July, 1799. 

But Coleridge did not stay long at home. From the 
English Lakes, where he had been visiting Wordsworth, 
he went to London to write political articles for The 
Morning Post and The Courier. He did work con- 
sistently hard for a time, and so well that Stuart offered 
him half shares in the two papers; "but I told him 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 321 

I would not give up the country and the lazy reading of 
old folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds." 
He was working, too, on a translation of Schiller's 
trilogy, Wallenstein, a work which, as time went on, 
filled him with "unutterable disgust," but which he 
managed to finish by the following April. 

In July, 1800, he moved with his family to Greta' 
Hall, Keswick, where Southey was already living. The 
two families shared the house with tolerable amica- 
bility, a fact which does great credit to the methodical 
Southey. There is a story that Southey went every now 
and then to his friend's study to retrieve chairs which 
Coleridge had in all friendliness appropriated. 

At first Coleridge was in high spirits. The scenery 
about Keswick pleased him much, and the Words- 
worths, now living near-by at Grasmere, were still his 
best friends. One gets little glimpses of the life in 
Dorothy Wordsworth's journal : " At eleven o'clock 
Coleridge came when I was walking in the still, clear 
moonshine in the garden. He came over Helvellyn. . . , 
We sat and chatted till half -past three." Another 
time : " We were very merry. . . . William read Ruthr 
It was under this inspiration that Coleridge wrote the 
second part of Christabel. 

The following winter, however, brought sickness, 
bodily and mental. He suffered greatly from rheumatic 
pains and swollen knee-joints. The un happiness in his 
home, too, began seriously about this time. Mrs. Cole- 
ridge's only fault, it was said, was fretfulness — not 
without cause, for she had much to bear in the irreso- 
lution of her husband, especially when her sister, Edith 
Southey, offered such a contrast in fortune. Yet, as 
Mr. Dykes Campbell points out, " fretting is one of the 



322 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

habits which bring about consequences that seem dis- 
proportionate." Coleridge was no doubt chiefly to blame, 
but his wife brought to him, besides fretfulness, no sym- 
pathy and no comprehension ; and it is not in the least 
remarkable that what had at first been merely feeble 
love had not only cooled into indifference, but had hard- 
ened into dislike. Coleridge perhaps owed her consider- 
ation, but that was not to be expected from a sick man. 
A thinly-lined purse, moreover, in spite of the yearly 
pension of XI 50 which the Wedgewoods had given him 
in order that he might write poetry, added to his cares. 
He sought in opium relief at first from bodily pain, then 
from mental and spiritual. Sometimes there were bright 
moments of regained health, of hope and renewed pur- 
pose, but they were usually forerunners of further sick- 
ness and dejection. It was in the latter spirit that he 
wrote, in the fall of 1801, his Ode to Dejection, one 
of the saddest poems in the English language, a poem 
which marks the end of his strongest poetic impulse ; 
it records 

" A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, 
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, 
In word, or sigh, or tear." 

Greta Hall had now become almost intolerable, and 
much of Coleridge's time was spent at Dove Cottage 
with the Wordsworths. Once he walked vigorously 
through Scotland, doing " 263 miles in eight days, in 
the hope of forcing the disease into the extremities. . . . 
While I am in possession of my will and my reason, I 
can keep the fiend at arm's length ; but with the night 
my horrors commence. During the whole of my journey, 
three nights out of four, I have fallen asleep struggling 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 323 

and resolving to lie awake, and awaking have blest the 
scream which delivered me from the reluctant sleep," 

The story of Coleridge's life has here reached its 
climax; in the Ode to Dejection the catastrophe is 
already shadowed forth. The "dark pillar" Lamb 
writes of has now been turned. The rest of his exist- 
ence — dragged through thirty years — is the story of 
projects deferred and promises broken, of family dis- 
cord and of moral weakness. Yet one is too apt to make 
much of the contrasts, to catch at the sensational and 
in this case condemning incidents. There were many 
bright years scattered through — notably 1809, 1817, 
and the last years. Out of the wreck of his earlier genius 
there arises finally the sage of Highgate, the wonderful 
talker who drew all wise men to hear him — a little 
infirm and broken perhaps, " an archangel slightly 
damaged," as Lamb quaintly puts it — but still an 
archangel, still the most marvelous, the most domi- 
nating figure of his day. 

During the years 1802-04, to return to the order of 
events, Coleridge was more than ever ill and dejected. 
He planned a trip to the Azores, he purposed to write 
for periodicals, to finish Christahel, he talked of a great 
work, Organum, vere Organum — but nothing came of 
the projects. He did finally get off for Malta in the 
spring of 1804. The climate, however, did not agree 
with him as he had hoped, and after a year and a half 
there — during part of which one is surprised to find 
him serving as acting secretary to the Tory governor, 
Sir Alexander Ball — he returned via Italy to England. 

But he did not go directly home ; "he recoils so 
much," said Wordsworth, "from the thought of domes- 
ticating with Mrs. Coleridge." That winter he and his 



324 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

wife agreed to a kind of separation. Coleridge saw her 
frequently again, not without friendliness, but the 
breach was never really mended. Indeed, he had become 
unfit to look after a home. " He ought not to have a 
wife or children," Charles Lamb wrote to Crabb Rob- 
inson ; " he should have a sort of diocesan care of the 
world — no parish duty." 

Towards the end of 1808, during a suspension of 
opium-taking while he was living with the Wordsworths, 
Coleridge rallied himself to the project of bringing 
out a weekly periodical. In June, 1809, although six 
months behind the promise in the prospectus. The 
Friend began to appear. But No. Ill came out seven 
weeks late, and the scheme fell through altogether with 
No. XXVII (March 15, 1810). The mere fact of com- 
position at Grasmere and publication at the distant vil- 
lage of Penrith, connected by no direct post, was suffi- 
cient to forecast the failure which Coleridge's delays 
made certain. 

In October, 1810, he joined Basil Montagu, who was 
returning to London, and thus, except for a short visit 
in 1812, left Greta HaU for good. He lived almost 
whoUy until 1816 at the house of John Morgan, a sym- 
pathetic friend who dwelt at No. 7, Portland Place, 
Hammersmith. At this time he took up journalism 
again, writing rather intermittently for the Courier. 

But the greatest events of these years were the pro- 
duction of Remorse and the Lectures. Lord Byron got 
the Drury Lane Committee to accept Remorse, the re- 
written Osorio, and it was put on the stage January 
23, 1813. It ran for twenty nights and Coleridge made 
by it £400. The Lectures on Shakespeare, unwritten 
and for the most part unprepared, but among the most 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 325 

brilliant achievements of his life, were given in the fall 
and winter of 1812. During the following two years 
similar lectures — conversational, brilliant — were given 
in Bristol. Frequently Coleridge came late — at Bristol 
two or three days late. There is an amusing story, 
illustrative of his powers, telling how, some years later, 
he received one morning a letter asking him to deliver 
a lecture that very evening — on what subject was not 
indicated. He got there on time for once, and was much 
astonished when the president of the London Philo- 
sophical Society announced to a crowded hall: "Mr. 
Coleridge will deliver a lecture on ' The Growth of the 
Individual Mind.' " "A pretty stiff subject," Coleridge 
whispered to Gillman, who had accompanied him ; but, 
says Gillman, " he plunged at once into his lecture — 
and most briUiant, eloquent, and logically consecutive 
it was." Coleridge's monopoly of conversation for thirty 
years had not been in vain. These apparently careless 
talks have established his fame as a critic. 

In 1814 miseries beset him again. He had shaken 
the affection of most of his friends and had brought on 
himself censure from Southey. He often neglected to 
answer letters, lacked sometimes even the courage to 
read them. The education of his sons was left largely 
to kind friends. He talks again of a great work, this 
time on " Christianity, the one true philosophy," pro- 
poses to write for the Courier^ and does nothing. In 
the fall the Morgans accompanied him to Calne, Wilt- 
shire, and there, thanks to Mrs. Morgan, who did much 
towards breaking him of the opium-habit, he regained 
sufficient vigor to get ready his Biographia Literaria 
— a history of his thought rather than of his life — and 
the Sibylline Leaves, published finally in 1817. 



228 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

There is but one more chapter to Coleridge's life. In 
April, 1816, he moved to the house of Dr. Gillman 
in Highgate, near Hampstead, the haunt of Keats 
and Leigh Hunt, where he " played," wrote Lamb to 
Wordsworth, " at leaving off laud-m." Here, except for 
a few brief visits and a trip up the Rhine with the 
Wordsworths in 1828, he lived the rest of his life. He 
was too far shattered to leave off laudanum altogether, 
but Dr. Gillman superintended and restricted the doses ; 
so that Coleridge passed his last years in comparatively 
even health. 

It must not be imagined, however, that he spent this 
time in comfortable opulence. He was never well off. 
The Wedgewood pension had been withdrawn in 1812, 
and Coleridge had been hving on the charity of the 
Morgans and what little his lectures and writings 
brought him. " Woe is me ! " he wrote in 1818, " that 
at 46 I am under the necessity of appearing as a lec- 
turer." Poverty, too, spurred him to write. In 1817 
was published the drama Zapolya, though it was never 
acted. To the years 1816 and 1817 belong the two Lay 
Sermons^ indicating Coleridge's complete change from 
his early radical views to faith in the institution of the 
English Church. At Highgate he resorted to a kind of 
philosophic teaching, the few members of his class pay- 
ing what they liked. This class later developed into the 
following of enthusiastic young men who hung on every 
precept. His Aids to Reflection, published in the spring 
of 1825, was hailed by them with delight. About the 
same time he was appointed to an associateship in the 
Royal Society of Literature, a nomination which 
brought him a hundred guineas a year, and when this 
was lost on the death of George IV, John Hookham 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 327 

Frere made it up to him annually. In consequence 
Coleridge wrote less and talked more. There was still 
much said of the Magnum Opus, to fill several vol- 
umes, but nothing came of it. The only important 
publication, in fact, between 1825 and his death was 
his collected Poetical and Dramatic Works in 1828. 
The year after his death, his nephew, Henry Nelson 
Coleridge, brought out Table Talk, an interesting re- 
cord of Coleridge's ohiter dicta during the last twelve 
years (1822-34). The Confessions of an Inquiring 
Spirit, written by Coleridge about 1824, was first pub- 
lished in 1840. 

During the days at Gillman's the philosopher be- 
came a picturesque and well-known figure. Some of his 
old friends now began to see more of him — especially 
Charles Lamb, mellowed into a kindly age. His wife 
and daughter came to the " Grove," as Gillman's house 
was called, to visit him ; his nephew was often there ; 
a remarkable young man, Joseph Henry Green, became 
his ardent disciple, and sought, after the master's death, 
to express the inexpressible Coleridgean system of phi- 
losophy ; and many other young men, such as John Ster- 
ling, were under the spell of his talk and thought. 
Others who sought out the Sage of Highgate were 
Landor, whose Imaginary Conversations were now 
appearing ; Edward Irving, a brilliant young preacher ; 
Harriet Martineau, from the Lakes; Emerson, whose 
youthful Unitarianism found no favor with the re- 
canter ; Crabb Robinson, a kind of Boswell to Words- 
worth and Coleridge, and Carlyle, just rising to promi- 
nence. After 1824, " Thursday " became a regular 
evening for such visitors. 

Carlyle has left the world a famous picture of the 



328 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

aged Coleridge. Carlyle, it must be remembered, was 
gloomy and vigorous, had plenty of philosophy of his 
own, and was intolerant of senility ; yet his picture, if 
only for the outward aspect, is worth quoting in part, 
and in places does, after all, much justice to Coleridge. 
" Coleridge," he says, " sat on the brow of Highgate 
Hill in those years looking down on London and its 
smoke tumult like a sage escaped from the inanity of 
life's battle, attracting towards him the thoughts of 
innumerable brave souls still engaged there. . . . He 
was thought to hold — he alone in England — the key 
of German and other Transcendentalisms ; knew the 
sublime secret of believing by the ' reason ' what the 
' understanding ' had been obliged to fling out as in- 
credible ; and could still, after Hume and Voltaire had 
done their best and worst with him, profess himself an 
orthodox Christian, and say and point to the Church 
of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices, 
at Allhallowtide, Esto perpetua. A sublime man, who 
alone in those dark days had saved his crown of spir- 
itual manhood, escaping from the black materialisms 
and revolutionary deluges with ' God, Freedom, Immor- 
tality,' still his; a king of men. The practical intel- 
lects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly 
reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer ; but to the rising 
spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sub- 
lime character, and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt 
in mystery and enigma." " Brow and head," Carlyle 
goes on, " were round and of massive weight, but the 
face was flabby and irresolute. The deep eyes, of a 
light hazel, were as full of sorrow as of inspiration ; 
confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind 
of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good 



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 329 

and amiable otherwise, might he called flabby and 
irresolute ; expressive of weakness under possibility of 
strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees 
bent, and stooping attitude; in walking he rather shuf- 
fled than decisively stept ; and a lady once remarked 
he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would 
suit him best, but continually shifted, corkscrew fash- 
ion, and kept trying both ; a heavy-laden, high-aspiring, 
and surely much-suffering man. ... I still recollect 
his ' object ' and ' subject ' . . . and how he sang and 
snuffled them into * om-m-ject,' and ' sum-m-ject ' with 
a kind of solemn shake or quaver as he rolled along." 
And once more : *' He began anywhere ; you put some 
question to him, made some suggestive observation ; in- 
stead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards 
an answer of it, he would accumulate formidable ap- 
paratus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-pre- 
servers, and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear 
for setting out ; perhaps did at last get under way — 
but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the flame of 
some radiant new game on this hand or on that into 
new courses, and ever into new." 

There is a story, very likely untrue, but very amusing 
and exaggeratedly characteristic of Coleridge's length 
of discourse. Lamb, the story runs, once met him in a 
crowded street, was caught by the button, and drawn 
into a doorway. Thereupon the Sage of Highgate, still 
holding to the button, began a dissertation, and, after 
his manner, closed his eyes " as he rolled along." Lamb 
was interested enough, but his business was pressing, 
so he cut off the button and escaped. Hours later, it 
is said, he returned to find Coleridge still holding the 
button, still in impassioned utterance. 



330 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Not long before his death, Coleridge was blessed by 
a hitherto unknown serenity. But it was not for a great 
while. On July 20, 1834, he fell ill, and for a few days 
suffered much. At the last, however, he was quiet and 
happy. He died on July 25, and was buried beneath 
Highgate Church. " His great spirit haunts me," wrote 
Wordsworth years later. " Never saw I his likeness, 
nor probably the world can see again ; " and under the 
stress of more immediate grief he paid this tribute to 
his friends Coleridge and Lamb : — 

" Nor has the rolling year twice measured, 
From sign to sign, its steadfast course, 
Since every mortal power of Coleridge 
Was frozen at its marvellous source; 

" The rapt One, of the godlike forehead, 
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: 
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, 
Has vanished from his lonely hearth. 

" Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits, 
Or waves that own no curbing hand. 
How fast has brother followed brother 
From sunshine to the sunless land." 



CHARLES LAMB 

" I WAS born," says Lamb, " and passed tbe first 
seven years of my life, in the Temple." These words 
tell a great part of Lamb's story. No other man except 
Dr. Johnson gives one such intimate, easy acquaintance 
with the innermost places of the " city," from Fen- 
church Street to Temple Bar. And from no other life 
do we get so delightful and familiar a glimpse of the 
literary people of his day — the day of Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, and Keats. But the 
quality which Lamb possesses above all others is the 
power to give, in his letters, real life and substance to 
the lesser writers of his day; with him we meet that 
whole society of strange and fascinating men and see 
them again moving about the streets of London — such 
men as Hazlitt, Landor, and Leigh Hunt; Lloyd, the 
misantlu-opic poet ; H. C. Robinson, the indefatigable 
diarist ; Godwin, the bankrupt philosopher ; Tom Hood, 
"that half Hogarth," as Lamb called him; Hay don, 
the florid artist; Taylor and Hessey, proprietors of the 
London Magazine and friends of genius; Moxon, the 
publisher; the Cowden Clarices, of Enfield, friends of 
Keats; Fanny Kelly and Charles Kemble, from the 
stage; and Talfourd, lawyer, dramatist, and first bio- 
grapher of Lamb. And how many others, forgotten but 
for Charles Lamb, come to life at his name ! — Barton, 
the Quaker poet; Thomas Manning, the first English- 
man to enter Llassa, Thibet ; Valentine Le Grice, friend 
of boyhood days and brilliant punster; James Kenney, 



332 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

the dramatist; George Burnett, Pantisocrat, who died 
in a work-house ; Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times ; 
the Burneys, incomparable at whist ; and poor George 
Dyer, kindly, half-mad poet, hugging " his intolerable 
flannel vestment closer about his poetic loins " — a fel- 
low infinitely picturesque. Of most of these and of many 
more Lamb was the intimate friend ; by every one he 
was beloved. 

It is this lovable quality in Lamb, in fact, which is 
his most striking characteristic. " Val " Le Grice no- 
ticed — and everyone repeats it because it is so true — 
that men rarely spoke of Lamb except as " Charles 
Lamb," and Le Grice found therein a subtle touch of 
affection. To no other writer can " gentle " be more 
aptly applied. 

The quaint humor of Lamb, best seen in his Elia 
essays, has become proverbial. But many, remembering 
only jests, think of him far too often as a mere wag, a 
professional wit. Such persons of course miss the real 
cause of his fame; they fail to grasp the far deeper 
humor which plays along the borderland of pathos, the 
humor which really distinguishes a man in a century. 
Few men have made more puns, few men have had a 
more instinctive relish for " excellent fooling ; " but 
Lamb's most genuine humor has a touch of sadness in 
it ; Elia is " full," as Barry Cornwall put it, " of a witty 
melancholy ; " and those who knew Lamb said he was 
at his best when serious. " No one," says Hazlitt, " ever 
stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things, 
in half a dozen sentences." A volume of anecdotes, 
however amusing, cannot hide the pathos of his life. 

Charles Lamb was born in Crown Office Row in the 
Temple, London, on February 10, 1775. His father, 



CHARLES LAMB 333 

John Lamb, was in the service of one Samuel Salt, a 
" bencher " of the Inner Temple. Of this parent (under 
the name of Lovel) Charles Lamb gives an account in 
one of his Elia essays : " He was a man of an incor- 
rigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and 
'would strike.' . . . L. was the liveliest little fellow 
breathing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was 
said greatly to resemble . . . , possessed a fine turn for 
humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior, — moulded 
heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by 
the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage 
boards, and such small cabinet toys, to perfection ; 
took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; 
made punch better than any man of his degree in Eng- 
land ; had the merriest quips and conceits, and was 
altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as 
you could desire." Charles Lamb's mother was an Eliz- 
abeth Field, of Blakesware, in Hertfordshire ; and it 
is from this connection that Lamb's interest in that 
county arose, whence his essays on " Blakesmoor in 
Hertfordshire," " Mackery End," and all the delight- 
ful reminiscence of " Grandmother Field." Of the six 
children only two besides Charles survived infancy : 
John and Mary, twelve and ten years his seniors. John 
went early into the South Sea House and practically 
separated from his family. Of Mary more presently. 

Charles was a nervous, imaginative boy. " The night- 
time solitude," he says, " and the dark, were my hell. 
The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify 
the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I 
suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year 
of my life — so far as memory serves in things so long 
ago — without an assurance, which realized its own 



334 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre." About his 
education little is known till he was sent, when still a 
small boy, to the day-school of a Mr. Bird, off Fetter 
Lane. When he was only seven a place was procured, 
probably through the efforts of Mr. Samuel Salt, in 
Christ Hospital School. 

The famous " blue-coat " school, attended by Cole- 
ridge and Leigh Hunt, has been well described by the 
latter. " We rose to the call of a bell, at six in sum- 
mer, and seven in winter. . . . From breakfast we 
proceeded to school, where we remained till eleven, win- 
ter and summer, and then had an hour's play. Dinner 
took place at twelve. Afterward was a little play till 
one, when we again went to school, and remained till 
five in summer and four in winter. At six was the 
supper. We used to play after it in summer till eight. 
In winter we proceeded from supper to bed." The 
meals Hunt describes as follows : " Our breakfast was 
bread (half of a three-halfpenny loaf) and water, for 
the beer was too bad to drink. . . . For dinner, we had 
the same quantity of bread, with meat only every other 
day. ... On the other days, we had a milk-porridge, 
ludicrously thin; or rice-milk, which was better. . . . 
For supper, we had a like piece of bread, with butter 
or cheese." Lamb, it seems, was somewhat envied for 
the hot rolls which were sent in to him and for frequent 
visits to his home. Otherwise he was subjected to the 
heroic regimen set forth by Hunt. But there were nu- 
merous holidays when the penniless boys, always in their 
blue coats and yellow stockings, roamed the streets or 
near-by country in quest of adventure. How they lived 
and grew, and how the master, James Boyer, ruled with 
a rouo'h hand, and what friends Charles Lamb made 



CHARLES LAMB 335 

there, — more especially Coleridge, the Le Grice boys, 
and " Jem" White, immortalized in the Chimney-sweep 
essay, — are not all these things recorded in Lamb's 
" Recollections of Christ's Hospital " and " Christ's Hos- 
pital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago " ? Of his learning it 
is sufficient to say that he was a good Latin scholar, 
knew little Greek, and did not become a " Grecian " 
(or boy of highest rank), but was made a " Deputy 
Grecian." His greatest education was in the reading 
of old and curious literature, for which aU through life 
he had a quaint fondness. 

In November, 1789, when he was only fourteen, 
Charles left school and soon after "went to work." For 
a short time he was in a Mr. Paice's office ; next he 
was a very humble clerk in the South Sea House, where 
his brother John worked; finally, in April, 1792, he 
obtained a position of clerk in the accountant's office of 
the East India House, and there he stayed for thirty- 
three years of uncongenial, daily labor. 

Soon after Lamb entered the East India House his 
family moved to Little Queen Street. Those were the 
times of the rare evenings in the company of Coleridge 
at the '• Salutation." Lamb himself had begun to write 
poetry. His earliest effort was made in 1789, and by 
1794 he had taken to it seriously. The immediate cause 

seems to have been "Alice W ," of whom nothing 

is known except that she has been identified by Canon 
Ainger with an Ann Simmons who lived near Blakes- 
ware, that some of Lamb's earlier sonnets were addressed 
to her, and that she was probably the dream-wife in his 
tenderest essay, " Dream-Children," written twenty-five 
years later. 

For six weeks in the winter of 1795-96 Lamb was 



336 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

in a madhouse, some believe as a result of his disap- 
pointment in love. There was of course a strong tendency 
to madness in his family, but it is important to note, in 
correction of various reports, that this was Lamb's first 
and last attack. Soon after coming out of the confine- 
ment, he wrote to Coleridge : "I look back upon it at 
times with a gloomy kind of envy : for, while it lasted, 
I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, 
Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wild- 
ness of Fancy till you have gone mad." 

Poor Mary Lamb, his sister, had a worse attack, and 
in September, 1796, in a fit of insanity killed her 
mother. " I was at hand," wrote Lamb to Coleridge, 
" only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. 
She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I fear 
she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved 
me to my senses : I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have 
my judgment, I believe, very sound." " I look upon 
you," wrote Coleridge in reply, "as a man called by 
sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes 
into quietness, and a sotd set apart and made peculiar 
to God." 

Then followed, indeed, some hard years for Charles 
Lamb. With his old aunt Hetty and his now half- 
imbecile father he moved to 45, Chapel Street, Penton- 
ville. His evenings were spent playing cribbage with 
his father, " who," he wrote, " will not let me enjoy a 
meal in peace — but I must conform to my situation, 
and I hope I am, for the most part, not unthankful." 

It was under these depressing cares that Lamb wrote 
his best and saddest poem. The Old Familiar Faces^ 
full of a sorrow inexpressible, one would have said, if 
he had not expressed it. He had already been in print. 



CHARLES LAMB 337 

Four of his sonnets had been afctached to Coleridge's 

JPoems of 1796, and to the title of Coleridge's second 

edition (1797) were added the words Poems hy Charles 

Lamb and Charles Lloyd. The Old Familiar Faces 

was published in 1798, in a small volume of verse by 

Lamb and Lloyd. " I have had playmates," says Lamb, 

" I have had companions, 
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days — 
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." 

The lament was particularly for Coleridge, now living 
far away at Stowey, and for Lloyd, under an alien roof. 
And, as if to make the sorrow still more real. Lamb 
was soon after the writing of this poem alienated from 
Coleridge, on account of his friend's difference with the 
melancholy Lloyd. By 1800 the friendship was renewed 
and happily never broken again. 

In 1799, when his father died, — his aunt had died 
two years before, — Lamb took his sister, who was again 
well, to live with him ; and thenceforward, as her guard- 
ian, he cared for her tenderly the rest of his life. All 
who knew her testify that, except in moments when the 
insanity returned, she was a person hardly less delight- 
ful than her brother. " I will, some day," Lamb wrote 
to Coleridge a month after the tragedy, "as I promised, 
enlarge to you upon my sister's excellences : 't will seem 
like exaggeration ; but I will do it." Certainly she was 
a great help to him ; and together they bore bravely a 
burden either alone would have endured with difficulty. 
Unfortunately, the malady did at times recur. She could 
tell, however, when these times were coming, and then 
the brother and sister might be seen, it is said, walking 
hand in hand, with tears in their eyes, to the asylum at 
Hoxton. 



338 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

It was difficult of course for two such persons to keep 
one place of lodging. For some time tliey moved about 
frequently, though always in London, till in 1801 they 
settled in the Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple. In 
1809 they changed to 4, Inner Temple Lane ; from 1817 
to 1823 they were in Russell Street, Co vent Garden, 
except for a short trip to France in 1822 ; and after 
1823 lived in Islington, Enfield Chace, and Edmonton. 
They were never well-to-do, but Mr. Lucas has caUed 
attention to the fact that their poverty has been exag- 
gerated. Lamb worked hard for an increasing salary ; 
and by middle life he was able to add to his savings 
considerable money earned by his pen. 

Soon after the beginning of the century Lamb found 
his way into a small literary recognition. In 1798 he 
had published A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old 
Blind Margaret. In 1802 came a play, John Woodvil; 
and in 1803 he sent Manning his well-known lines to 
Hester Savory, "a young Quaker," he says, "you may 
have heard me speak of as being in love with for some 
years while I lived at Pentonville, though I had never 
spoken to her in my life. She died about a month since." 
In 1805 Godwin, who had become a publisher of chil- 
dren's books, asked Lamb and his sister to do the Tales 
from Shakespeare. Charles did the tragedies, Mary the 
comedies, and the now well-known little book was pub- 
lished in 1807. Meanwhile, in 1806, Lamb and his sis- 
ter had brought out Mrs. Leicester's School ; and in the 
same year Mr. H., a farce by Lamb, had been put on 
the stage. Mr. H. failed signally, and the author himself 
joined in the derision. In 1808 appeared the Adven- 
tures of Ulysses, now one of his most familiar books 
among children ; and in the same year came out a more 



CHARLES LAMB 339 

substantial work, his Specimens of English Dramatic 
Poets Contemporary with Shahespeare. JElia and re- 
nown were yet to come, but henceforward Lamb was 
a recognized writer. 

One of the most memorable qualities of Lamb was his 
indescribably delightful flavor of old English writers — 
the Jacobean dramatists. Sir Thomas Browne, Izaak 
Walton, and "hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton." " Hang the 
age ! " he once cried ; " I will write for antiquity." In 
one of his later essays, that on " Old China," Bridget 
Elia (Mary Lamb) asks him if he remembers the old 
days when they saved every penny to buy " that folio 
Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late 
at night from Barker's in Co vent Garden ? " No one 
brings back so pleasantly as Lamb the spirit of old 
authors ; there is a relish in his mere mention of them. 
In another essay, on " Books and Reading," he runs on: 
" The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the 
mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of 
Hawthornden, and Cowley. . . . Milton almost requires 
a solemn service of music to be played before you enter 
upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who 
listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears. 
. . . Winter evenings — the world shut out — with 
less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters." 

This little man, with his quaint flavor of the past, 
became, by 1810, a familiar figure among London lit- 
erary men. So striking was his appearance that many 
have left some description of it. He had a large, long 
head, an aquiline nose, a high forehead, black stiff hair, 
a small spare body, and smaller legs. " He had a hor- 
ror," he says of Elia (that is, himself), "which he 
carried to a foible, of looking like anything important 



340 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and parocliial. He thouglit that he approached nearer 
to that stamp daily." Indeed, he did dress more and 
more, despite his aversion, like a Methodist preacher. 
When long trousers came in he continued, like Cole- 
ridge, to wear knee-breeches ; and his dress, says Barry 
Cornwall, " indicated much wear." In a letter to Man- 
ning, Lamb called himself " a compound of the Jew, the 
gentleman, and the angel." " His features," says Leigh 
Hunt, " were strongly yet delicately cut : he had a fine 
eye as well as forehead ; and no face carried in it 
greater marks of thought and feeling." Elia thus goes 
on to- describe his habits : "He herded always, while it 
was possible, with people younger than himself. He 
did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged 
along in the procession. . . . The impressions of in- 
fancy had burnt into him, and he resented the imperti- 
nence of manhood." Lamb's manner of moving was 
rather tentative, though he was a great walker ; he 
stuttered considerably, too; and his whole appearance 
to such resolute young men as Carlyle, who visited 
Lamb at Enfield in 1831, and called him "pitiful, rick- 
ety, gasping, staggering," was that of a querulous, lit- 
tle old man. But Lamb, who detested arrogance and 
self-assurance, could hit back if necessary. He formed 
a much better estimate of Carlyle and his race than 
the great prophet formed of him.^ Once, Leigh Hunt 
says, " when somebody was speaking of a person who 
valued himself on being a matter-of-fact man," Lamb 
replied, " ' Now, I value myself on being a matter-of-lie 
man.' " 

Charles Lamb's quaint humor was of course irresist- 
ible, — except to a few Scotchmen, — and by it and good 

^ See the essay " Imperfect Sympathies." 



CHARLES LAMB 341 

literary taste he drew many to his simple lodgings to 
talk, to dine, to play cards. Most of all, men were 
drawn by his indefinable gentleness. For a while, 
" Thursday evenings " (really late Wednesday) became 
regular times for visitors ; and while the ardent youth 
gathered at Highgate to admire Coleridge, talking 
transcendentalism, men of all sorts found their way 
to Inner Temple Lane, Russell Street, and Islington to 
enjoy Charles Lamb. 

Lamb, it must be admitted, was given to conviviality, 
sometimes to too much. It is not fair, however, to judge 
the amount by his frequent efforts to renounce the bot- 
tle and the pipe or by his essay " Confessions of a 
Drunkard," which some pious souls have been pleased 
to take as strictly autobiographical and to treat as a 
religious tract. " The truth is," says Barry Cornwall, 
" that a small quantity of any strong liquid disturbed 
his speech, which at best was but an eloquent stammer." 
It would be perilous to attempt to condone Lamb's in- 
temperance, but it would be as presumptuous to assert 
that, in his case, drinking did him more than mere 
physical harm. Above all, it must be remembered that 
one hundred years ago driuikenness was not such an 
offense as it is to-day. 

Lamb's stutter is responsible for many of the most 
amusing anecdotes about him. Once, at the seaside, 
when he was to be " dipped " for his health, he said 
to the men who were to do the " dipping," as he shiv- 
ered on the steps of his bath-house, " I am to be 
di-di-dipped " — so the men had understood, and on 
hearing the word " dipped " they promptly submerged 
him. He came up gasping. " I tell you," he said, " I 
am to be di-di-dipped " — under he went again. After 



342 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

the third performance he got it out: "lam to be — 
I was to be di-di-dipped only once ! " 

One of Lamb's best friends, and one of the best 
actresses during the second decade of the century, was 
Fanny Kelly. On July 4, 1819, he wrote an article on 
Miss Kelly as " Rachel," for the Examiner^ in which 
he makes " a stranger who sat beside us " say of her, 
" ' What a lass that were to go a-gypsying through 
the world with.' " Mr. Lucas adds to the quota- 
tion : " Knowing what we do of Charles Lamb's little 
ways, we can be in no doubt as to the identity of the 
stranger who was fabled to have sat beside him." It 
is not so surprising, after this, to find him in love 
with her. In fact, only two weeks later he proposed 
by letter. She replied kindly, but refused him ; and 
he, treating the matter with admirable good humor, 
answered on the same day as the proposal, July 20, 
" Dear Miss Kelly : Your injunctions shall be obeyed 
to a tittle. I feel myself in a lackadaisical, no-how-ish 
kind of a humor. I believe it is the rain, or something," 
— and so on, with the result that they remained good 
friends. This action is of course no indication that 
Lamb's affections were not deep, but rather a sign 
that he, now in middle age, had learned the rare grace 
of saving a situation by humor. This, the kindliness 
growing upon him, and his wide and sympathetic 
observation of men and their foibles, made Elia pos- 
sible. 

Those famous essays, the name for which Lamb took 
from a clerk in the South Sea House of his early days, 
began in August of the following year (1820) in the 
London Magazine. He had been writing occasionally 
for periodicals, notably " Recollections of Christ's Hos- 



CHARLES LAMB 343 

pital " (1813) in the Gentleman^ s Magazine, and vari- 
ous papers for the Reflector and the Examiner. The 
first number of Elia was " Recollections of the South 
Sea House." Then followed those beloved by aU read- 
ers of Lamb : " Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years 
Ago," " New Year's Eve," " Mrs. Battle's Opinions on 
Whist," "A Chapter on Ears," " Mackery End," " The 
Old Benchers," "Grace before Meat," "Dream-Chil- 
dren," "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," "A Dis- 
sertation upon Roast Pig," and others not so familiar 
but quite worthy parts of the collected Essays of Elia 
in 1823. The Last Essays of Elia, finally published 
in book form in 1833, include some not printed in 
the first volume or those written after its publication. 
They number, too, many of the best : " Poor Rela- 
tions," " Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," 
" The Superannuated Man," " The Child Angel," and 
" Old China." 

It is chiefly for Elia, of course, that Lamb is re- 
membered. No one has approached him in this kind 
of familiar essay, either in the delicacy of his playful 
humor or in the tenderness of his sympathy. They are, 
in fact, most important in his biography ; for Lamb is 
Elia. They must not, to be sure, be too strictly in- 
terpreted as literal records of his life, but he is never 
quite absent ; most of them give charming, half -con- 
cealed glimpses of their gentle author. 

From Lamb's Letters, too, one may get a pleasant 
and fairly complete picture of the man ; they contain 
his unfailing wit, the sadness of his early days of 
manhood, and the tenderness of his genial maturity. 
" Who, I wonder," says Mr. Birrell, " ever managed 
to squeeze into a correspondence of forty years truer 



344 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

humor, madder nonsense, or more tender sympathy ! " 
In fact, these excellent Letters and Elia give almost 
the whole man — too changeful, too uncapturahle, to 
be put in a phrase, and on that account always freshly 
interesting. Scarcely any figure in the whole range of 
literature can be known so intimately as a human 
being, aside from his literary fame. He clung tena- 
ciously to life and living men and women. " I am in 
love with this green earth," he says in " New Year's 
Eve." "... I would set up my tabernacle here. . . . 
A new state of being staggers me." And in 1827 he 
wrote to Robinson, after the death of an old friend, 
Randal Norris, " I have none to call me Charley now." 
In March, 1822, Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, in 
referring to the East India House, " Thirty years have 
I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued 
to the yoke." Three years later, he was retired on a 
pension of <£441 a year. " I walk about, not to and 
from," he says quaintly in " The Superannuated Man," 
an essay published in May, 1725 ; "... I grow into 
gentility perceptibly. ... I have worked task- work, 
and have the rest of the day to myself." But he had 
been too long in the service ever to get used to so 
much leisure. He called Enfield " this vale of delib- 
erate senectitude," and half wished for the old bond- 
age. The household was brightened, however, by the 
adoption, in 1823, of a little girl named Emma Isola. 
Ten years later she married Moxon, the publisher. 
Lamb continued to write occasionally through these 
last years : some of his last Elia essays, Album Verses 
(1830), and Satan in Search of a Wife (1831). On 
December 22, 1834, he stumbled and fell, was not 
strong enough to recover from the blow, and " sank 



CHARLES LAMB 345 

into death," says Talfourd, " as placidly as into sleep," 
on December 27, 1834, in his sixtieth year. 

Those who would enjoy to the full Lamb's numerous 
clever sayings and the best anecdotes about him should 
follow him through the excellent Life by Mr. E. V. 
Lucas. Here there is space for only a few. At Haydon's 
"immortal dinner," in 1816, when Keats, Wordsworth, 
and Lamb talked so rarely, there was also present a 
pompous comptroller of stamps, who insisted on an inti- 
macy with Wordsworth, and who asked, among other 
strange questions, " Don't you think Newton a great 
genius ? " "I could not stand it any longer," says 
Haydon. " Keats put his head into my books. . . . 
Wordsworth seemed asking himself, ' Who is this ? ' 
Lamb got up, and taking a candle, said, ' Sir, wiU you 
allow me to look at your phrenological development?' 
He then turned his back on the poor man and at every 
question of the comptroller he chanted — 

* Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John 
Went to bed with his breeches on.' 

. . . Keats and I hurried Lamb into the painting- 
room, shut the door and gave way to inextinguishable 
laughter. . . . All the while we could hear Lamb strug- 
gling in the painting-room and calling at intervals, 
' Who is that f eUow ? Allow me to see his organs once 
more.' " 

There is a story that one evening Lamb, who had 
urged Wordsworth to expunge the lines in Peter Bell — 

" Is it a party in a parlor 
All silent and all damned ? " — 

as he passed a window through which were visible a 
company sitting in silent plush solemnit}'-, shook the 



346 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

railings and called out : "A party in a parlor, all silent 
and all damned ! " 

Another time Coleridge said, " Charles, I think you 
have heard me preach?" " I n-n-never heard you do 
anything else," replied Lamb. 

But Lamb's jokes, however excellent, are not, it 
must be remembered, the greater part of him. In his 
" uncomplaining endurance," says Barry Cornwall, "and 
in his steady adherence to a great principle of conduct, 
his life was heroic." " There was no fuss or cant about 
him," is one of Hazlitt's many tributes ; " nor were 
his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of 
affectation." The world is coming to see that in doing 
no more than enjoy Lamb's puns and happy phrases it 
has done him scant justice ; that his life was made sad 
by a tragic duty and sublime by his quiet, manly bear- 
ing of his burden. 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 

After Coleridge and Lamb one may well be pre- 
pared for extremes of genius ; but one finds, in follow- 
ing Thomas De Quincey, that one has not half guessed 
the vagaries which human nature can take. De Quincey, 
in fact, is the most various, the most elusive in char- 
acter of all the great Romanticists ; and it is only by 
coming to him with no preconceptions that one can 
possibly reconcile his intellectual power with his ten- 
dency to dreams, his strong will with his enslavement 
to an injurious habit, his shyness and solitude with his 
love of human society, and his minutely logical mind 
with his disorderly methods of life. As he himself said, 
" not to sympathize is not to understand." 

On account of the sensational title of one of his books 
De Quincey has been too exclusively associated with 
opium-eating. With his use of the drug this narrative 
must deal later ; here, however, it is important to notice 
that he was not a dreamer because he took opium, but, 
as Mr. Page, his chief biographer, has pointed out, he 
rather took opium the more readily because he was a 
dreamer, because he had what he himself called a " con- 
stitutional determination to reverie." Yet to call him 
merely an inspired dreamer is superficial and inadequate. 
He was, Coleridge not excepted, the most magnificent 
dreamer of a body of men given to great visions ; but 
he was much more. He called himseK " an intellectual 
creature," in both pursuits and pleasures, from his 
school-days ; and this characteristic, intellectual force, 



348 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

can never rightly be dissociated from any glimpse of 
liim, whether in his dreams, in his humor, in his phi- 
losophy, or in the mere events of his life. Such an intel- 
lect, moreover, which could be the informing power of 
such emotional dreams, must have been intensely sym- 
pathetic ; and one is not surprised, therefore, to learn 
of his hatred of pedantry, his love of human beings, 
and, when his physical frailty is recognized, the almost 
immeasurable pain which he suffered. 

In spite of De Quincey's remark concerning bio- 
graphy, that "one is so certain of the man's being born, 
and also of his having died, that it is dismal to be under 
the necessity of reading it," the dates of his own birth 
and death are especially full of meaning ; for he was 
born early enough to be a contemporary and friend of 
the great Romanticists, and yet lived, not in aged repose, 
but in active literary work, to be the contemporary and 
friend of Victorian writers; he was born before the 
French Revolution and he outlived the Crimean War; 
Carlyle, Ruskin, Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and 
Tennyson were all famous years before his death. The 
exact date of his birth, which took place in Manchester, 
was August 15, 1785. He was the fifth child of Thomas 
Quincey, a merchant, and a Miss Penson. The family 
name had been English since the Conquest and was 
entitled to the prefix Z)e, which the son adopted, writing 
it, however, with a small d. 

Soon after the boy's birth the family lived at " The 
Farm," near Manchester, and in 1791 moved to Green- 
hay. Thus a great part of his childhood was spent in the 
country, his fondness for which was almost instinctive 
and lasted throughout his life. The earliest things he 
remembered were : " first, a remarkable dream of terrific 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 349 

grandeur about a favorite nurse, whicli is interesting to 
myself for this reason — that it demonstrates my dream- 
ing tendencies to have been constitutional and not de- 
pendent upon laudanum ; and secondly, the fact of 
having connected a profound sense of pathos with the 
reappearance, very early in the spring, of some cro- 
cuses." Before he was two he felt " the passion of 
grief," and soon afterwards " awe the most enduring, 
and a dawning sense of the infinite." Still more was he 
affected by the death of his sister Jane, though not so 
remarkably as by that of his sister Elizabeth when he 
was only five. He crept into the room where Elizabeth 
lay. " From the gorgeous sunlight," he says, " I turned 
round to the corpse. ... I stood checked for a moment ; 
awe, not fear, fell upon me ; and whilst I stood, a sol- 
emn wind began to blow — the saddest that ever ear 
heard. It was a wind that might have swept the field 
of mortality for a thousand centuries." Not long after- 
wards the little fellow's father, dying of consumption, 
was brought home. How graphically he describes the 
first sight, indelible after years ! — " the sudden emer- 
ging of horses' heads from the deep gloom of the shady 
lane ; the next was the mass of white pillows against 
which the dying patient was reclining." In no other 
writer is the record of childhood impressions more im- 
portant ; like Coleridge, he foreshadowed his manhood 
from his birth. 

When he was eight De Quincey was sent to a day- 
school at Salford, near by. He now came under the 
terrorizing dominion of an older brother. Fear and 
docility were uppermost. " What I was told to do I did, 
never presuming to murmur or to argue, or so much as 
to think about the nature of my orders. Doubtless, and 



350 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

willingly I allow it, if those orders were to run away, I 
obeyed them more cheerfully." In his classes the boy 
made remarkable progress and soon showed himself an 
excellent scholar. For better opportunities he was sent 
in his eleventh year to Bath Grammar School. There 
he developed his great interest in Greek. " At thirteen," 
he says, " I wrote Greek with ease, and at fifteen my 
command of that language was so great, that I not only 
composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but would con- 
verse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment. 
. . . ' That boy,' said one of my masters, . . . ' could 
harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could 
address an English one.' " 

From Bath De Quincey went for a short time to 
Winktield School in Wiltshire, which he left to make 
a trip to Ireland in 1800, with his friend Lord West- 
port. Of the various influences on his life at this time, 
that of a Miss Blake, for whom he felt a bashful ad- 
miration, was the strongest. " Ever after," he says, 
" throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of my 
own demeanor, reserved and awestruck in the presence 
of women ; reverencing often, not so much them^ as my 
own ideal of woman latent in them." The intellectual 
inspiration from Lady Carberry and the Rev. John 
Clowes, a clergyman in Manchester, were also of no 
small account in his early influences. 

In 1801 De Quincey was sent, against his will, to 
Manchester Grammar School. He was already prepared 
for Oxford. A small, delicate boy, he positively shrank 
from the pugilistic pastimes of his fellows ; and he felt 
no respect for his pedantic teacher. When July of the 
next year came round, therefore, he took the matter 
into his own hands and ran away. After his father's 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 351 

death lie was heir to <£150 a year, but could not get it 
until he came of age. By the influence of his uncle, 
Colonel Penson, however, who saw the boy was not to 
be brought back to Manchester bondage, he was allowed 
a guinea a week. Through the summer he roamed about 
the mountains of North Wales and slept in the open 
air ; but when winter came on he resolved, in spite of 
thereby forfeiting his allowance, to wander up to Lon- 
don and collect sufficient funds for Oxford. 

Now followed those days so vividly described in the 
Confessions: how he wandered penniless and faint 
about the streets, slept in an empty house in Greek 
Street with a little waif, made innocent and affectionate 
acquaintance with the homeless creatures of the side- 
walk (his references to Ann of Oxford Street contain 
some of his most touching pathos), and dreamed indel- 
ible, immortal dreams. This period in London was his 
" experience," his initiation into " human sorrow and 
strife too profound to pass away for years," and must 
be taken, along with his early childhood, as the most 
determining influence of his first twenty years. 

By 1803 De Quincey came to an arrangement with 
his relatives and was entered at Worcester College, Ox- 
ford. There he again shone as a brilliant scholar, but 
failed of a degree because, after passing a remarkably 
good written examination, he left suddenly, unable to 
face the viva voce test, in which he was expected to do 
equally well. Just why he went so abruptly has never 
been quite explained. He was in good repute at Oxford ; 
" generally known," says Dr. Cotton, then Provost of 
Worcester, " as a quiet and studious man." After all, 
he was De Quincey. 

While an undergraduate, in 1804, De Quincey first 



352 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

took opium to relieve severe neuralgia. So much has 
been said in connection with his use of the drug that it is 
important to understand clearly his beginning of the 
habit. Dr. Eatwell, who has carefully reviewed the 
whole case, testifies that De Quincey's condition, hered- 
itarily and as a result of his starvation in London, 
brought on a malady of the stomach similar to what 
the East Indians call " Peetsool," a malady for which 
opium is considered the only relief. This and his con- 
stant neuralgia, not " sensuous gratification," as Dr. 
Eatwell points out, were the real and pardonable cause 
of De Quincey's resort to opium. It is hard for an ordi- 
nary man to conceive what anguish so frail and sensi- 
tive a person must have suffered. The serious slip, of 
course, was to take the fatal cure without medical ad- 
vice and restriction and, once taken, to continue to such 
an extent that the horrors of opium were tenfold worse 
than the pains of disease. Though he showed at times 
great strength of will in his battle with the poison, yet 
moments came when all the benefits of good resolutions 
were swept away by sudden over-indulgence ; he himself 
admits that he " could not face misery with sufficient 
firmness." While he was at Oxford, however, opium 
was only an occasional cure, and his dreams there, in 
which Levana, afterwards the mysterious goddess of 
the Suspiria, often appeared to him, were chiefly the 
result of his " constitutional determination to reverie." 
De Quincey had for some time been an admirer, 
almost a worshiper, of Wordsworth and Coleridge ; in 
his frequent trips to London he had become familiar 
with Lamb and the Coleridgean circle ; and therefore, 
on leaving Oxford in 1808, he gladly turned his steps 
to the Lake District, to visit the Wordsworths at Allan 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 353 

Bank, Grasmere. In February, 1809, he moved into 
Dove Cottage, where he lived for many years, until his 
own family and many books forced him to find more 
room. In spirit he was really far more a member of the 
" Lake School " than any except Wordsworth. 

To give a list of De Quincey's friends through these 
and later years would include most of the great literary 
names of the day, those mentioned above and Hazlitt, 
Hood, and Talfourd being among the closest. Chief 
among his Lake friendships, and always enduring, was 
that with John Wilson of EUeray, commonly known as 
" Christopher North," the sturdy author of Nodes Am- 
hrosiance. In later years the affection for Wordsworth 
cooled, and gave rise to some of De Quincey's " faint 
praise " in his Reminiscences ; friendship was no longer 
possible, but to say that they quarreled or that they 
lost all admiration for one another is a great over- 
statement. 

De Quincey's marriage, in 1816, to Margaret Simp- 
son, daughter of a Westmoreland " statesman," or 
farmer, brought much happiness into his life. To her, 
watching patiently through years of her husband's suf- 
fering, too high praise cannot be given ; and he himself 
tenderly said as much after her death. Three years 
after his marriage he suddenly found himself face to 
face with poverty, for his open-handed generosity had 
exhausted much of his X150 a year. What he had so 
far written was inconsiderable, but he had always led 
a scholarly, literary life ; and now, though thirty-five 
years old, he turned immediately to his pen as a source 
of income. As a result he poured forth for over thirty 
years the most brilliant and various literature that 
magazines have ever known from one pen. His first 



354 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

regular work was as editor of the Tory JVestmoreland 
Gazette in 1819. In 1821 he went up to London, 
joined the staff of the London Magazine^ and in 
October and November published in that periodical 
his best-known work, The Confessions of an Eng- 
lish Opiwm-Eater. The first part of it tells of his 
early life and his predisposition to dreaming ; and the 
whole book is, in fact, not so much a discussion of 
opium as of dreaming, and, incidentally, of the influ- 
ence which opium has on dreams. Later it was con- 
siderably added to and published in his Collected 
Works (1853-60). 

What this influence of opium was no one knew bet- 
ter than he, for by 1821 he had passed through his 
worst experiences with the enemy. It was in 1812 that 
he first sank into over-indulgence and in 1813 that he 
reached the high mark of 8000 drops of laudanum per 
day. The effect was worse than the gnawing pains in 
his stomach which he strove to relieve ; he was cast 
into profound melancholy. By an effort of the will 
(and in this he was far stronger than poor Coleridge) 
he threw off the yoke for some years, regained his 
health, and, as has been seen, married in 1816. The 
following year, however, he fell again into " the gloom 
and cloudy melancholy of opium." There is not space 
here to transcribe more than a sentence or two from 
the Confessions : " In the early stages of my malady 
the splendors of my dreams were indeed chiefly archi- 
tectural ; and I beheld such pomps of cities and pal- 
aces as were never yet beheld by the waking eye, un- 
less in clouds, . . . But now, that which I have called 
the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself. 
Perhaps some part of my London life might be answer- 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 355 

able for this. Be that as it may, now it was that upon 
the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began 
to appear : the sea appeared to be paved with innumer- 
able faces, upturned to the heavens ; faces, imploring, 
wrathful, despairing, surged up by thousands, by 
myriads, by generations, by centuries: my agitation 
was infinite, my mind tossed and surged with the 
ocean." 

Twice again, after freeing himself by a great effort 
of the will, De Quincey fell to excess. The last time, 
in 1844, he fought it off by regular exercise : " Within 
a measured space of forty-four yards in circuit," he 
says, ..." I had within ninety days walked a thou- 
sand miles. And so far I triumphed. But because still 
I was irregular as to laudanum, this also I reformed." 
If there is something a trifle abject about the struggles 
and failures of the sick little man, there is something 
truly great about his final victory, with the remark 
" this also I reformed," when he was past middle age. 
For after 1844 he was able to control the dose as he 
felt necessary, and he never again went to excess. 

Only for brief periods, it must be realized, was De 
Quincey incapacitated for work. He wrote with great 
fluency and vigor, though with little regularity. His 
intellect held strong to the end. In 1826 he became a 
contributor to Blachwood''s Magazine^ and in 1830 
moved to Edinburgh to be near his work. Until his 
Collected Worhs he published only two volumes be- 
sides the Confessions, of which numei'ous editions were 
in demand: KlosterJieim (1832), a novel; and The 
Logic of Political Economy (1844). For Black- 
wood's he wrote Murder Considered as One of the Fine 
Arts, biographies of Kant and Dr. Parr, The Ctesars, 



356 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The Revolt of the Tartars, the essays on Style and 
Rhetoric, The Philosojihy of Herodotus, Suspiria de 
Profundis, and The English Mail-Coaeh. To Taifs 
Magazine he contributed Joan of Arc, The Spanish 
Military JVun, and his Literary Reminiscences. The 
TJncyclopcedia Britannica included his articles on 
Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare. 

All of these works, in one way or another, show his 
many-sided power ; none so much as the Suspiria, un- 
less perhaps his famous Confessions, so deeply or so 
eloquently expresses his insight into dreams and his 
ability to make real and magnificent the characters of 
dreams. In it there is lacking much of the familiar De 
Quincey, the quaint, scholarly humorist ; but in it is 
especially revealed the most important De Quincey, the 
inspired interpreter of dreams. " I know them thor- 
oughly," he says, " and have walked in all their king- 
doms. Three sisters they are, of one mysterious house- 
hold ; and their paths are wide apart ; but of their 
dominion there is no end. Them I saw often convers- 
ing with Levana, and sometimes about myself. . . . 
Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but 
still with tragic grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps tim- 
idly and stealthily. But this yoimgest sister moves 
with incalculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's 
leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely 
amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is 
permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater 
Tenehrarum, — Our Lady of Darkness." 

In his last years De Quincey became a familiar figure. 
He was shy, deliberately sought solitude, and was hence 
not widely known in Edinburgh society ; but he was 
intimate with many literary men. Professor Masson 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 357 

tells amusingly how it was really easy to get De Quincey 
to dine with you " if you knew the way." " He would 
promise — promise most punctually, and, if he saw you 
doubted, reassure you with a dissertation on the beauty 
of punctuality ; but when the time came, and you were 
all met, a hundred to one you were without your De Quin- 
cey. But send a cab for him, and some one in it to fetch 
him, and he came meekly, unresistingly, as if it were 
his doom, and he conceived it appointed that, in case of 
resistance, he should be carried out by the nape of the 
neck. . . . And was it not a treat? Hour after hour 
there was the stream, the sweet and subtle eddying-on 
of the silver talk." 

Of De Quincey's personal appearance there are many 
descriptions. Mr. J. R. Findlay says : " He was a very 
little man (about 5 feet 3 or 4 inches) ; his coun- 
tenance the most remarkable for its intellectual attrac- 
tiveness that I have ever seen. His features, though not 
regular, were aristocratically fine, and an air of delicate 
breeding pervaded the face. His forehead was unusually 
high, square, and compact." And Carlyle, with an eye 
for a memorable phrase, writes: "You would have taken 
him, by candlelight, for the beautifullest little child ; 
blue-eyed, blonde-haired, sparkling face — had there not 
been something too which said, ' Eccovi, this Child has 
been in HeU.' " 

There is abundant record of De Quincey's odd ways. 
Sometimes on an inspiration for work he would stop 
dressing, continue forgetful of the cooling coffee by 
him, and, if a visitor called, hurry into incongruous 
clothes and put on his shoes without noticing that 
he wore only one sock. Almost daily he set something 
about the house on fire, " the commonest incident being," 



358 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

says his daughter, Mrs. Baird Smith, " for some one 
to look up from work or book to say casually, ' Papa, 
your hair is on fire,' of which a calm ' Is it, my love ? ' and 
a hand rubbing out the blaze was all the notice taken." 
He had a way of polishing all shillings that came into 
his hands. But his strang-est habit was that of filling: 
room after room with chaotic manuscript. When he 
was thus " snowed up," he moved to another place. In 
this way he had at his death half a dozen rooms, at 
expense wholly beyond him, rented in various parts of 
Edinburgh. Once, it is said, he filled a bath-tub with 
his turbulent papers. " When it was my frequent and 
agreeable duty to call on Mr. De Quincey," says Hood, 
" and I have found him at home, quite at home, in the 
midst of a German Ocean of literature in a storm, flood- 
ing all the floor, the tables ; billows of books tossing, 
tumbling, surging open — on such occasions I have will- 
ingly listened by the hour, whilst the philosopher, stand- 
ing with his eyes fixed on one side of the room, seemed 
to be less speaking than reading from ' a handwriting 
on the waU.' " 

In conversation De Quincey had at least one advan- 
tage over Coleridge : he was a good listener as well as 
talker. " When fully kindled up and warmed by his 
subject," says one writer, " his whole talk is poetry ; 
and his slight, attenuated frame, pale countenance, and 
massive forehead, with the singular sweetness and melody 
of his voice and language, impress one as if a voice from 
the dead — from some ' old man eloquent ' — had risen 
to tell us of the hidden world of thought and imagina- 
tion and knowledge." " ' Oh, for one hour of Dundee ! ' 
— one hour of De Quincey ! " cries Charles Knight. 
" Better three hours, from nine till midnight, for a rapt 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 359 

listener to be ' under the wand of the magician,' spell- 
bound by his wonderful affluence of talk, such as that 
of the fairy whose lips dropped rubies and diamonds." 

De Quincey's abundant humor must not be passed 
by. " Both Lamb and myself," he says, " had a furious 
love for nonsense — headlong nonsense." This is readily 
granted by all who know his letters and that excellent 
piece of extravagance, Murder Considered as One of the 
Fine Arts. But he was capable, too, of the subtle turn 
worthy of Lamb himself. In describing the advantages 
of Grasmere he writes to Knight : " New potatoes of 
celestial earthiness and raciness, which with us last to 
October ; and finally milk, milk, milk — cream, cream, 
cream (hear it, thou benighted Londoner !), in which 
you must and shall bathe ; " — a letter doubly humorous 
when one remembers how rarely De Quincey himself 
could eat anything even approximating a meal. In writ- 
ing to an old schoolfellow in 1847, he said that he had 
had no dinner since parting from him in the eighteenth 
century. 

The pathos in De Quincey's life, however, even more 
than in Lamb's, outweighs the humor. His affection 
for children is very touching. " Mr. Kinsey " was always 
welcome to the Wordsworth children, and long after 
Kate Wordsworth's death he saw her, he says, walking 
among the hills. It was particularly hard on such an 
affectionate nature to lose one son in 1833, another in 
1835, and his wife in 1837. Still more, he was by no 
means well off ; friends, chief among them Coleridge, 
had long ago used up most of his patrimony, and he 
continued to give away the chief part of what he earned. 
"His presence at home," says his daughter, "was the 
signal for a crowd of beggars, among whom borrowed 



360 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

babies and drunken old women were sure of the largest 
share of his sympathies." His poverty, in fact, is the 
one thing in De Quincey's life easy to explain. 

In 1840 he took a cottage, Mavis Bush, near Lass- 
wade, with his daughters. He was a great walker, and, 
though now seventy, frequently trudged to Edinburgh 
and back even after dark, a distance of fourteen miles. 
Sometimes he disappeared for weeks at a time. His 
daughters knew his habits, how when a change of scene 
was necessary there was no holding him, knew also 
that he was with kind friends in Edinburgh, and that 
he would some day turn up at home. Towards the 
end of his life he spent most of his time in lodgings 
in Lothian Street, Edinburgh. Late in 1859 he was 
very low, rather from old age than from sickness, and 
on December 8 he died. He was buried in the West 
Churchyard of Edinburgh. In his last hours there was 
some delirium, during which he was heard to cry, 
" Sister ! Sister ! Sister ! " — calling thus in his last 
words on his little sister Elizabeth, of whom he had 
written : " Pillar of fire, that didst go before me to 
guide and to quicken — pillar of darkness, when thy 
countenance was turned away to God, that didst too 
truly reveal to my dawning fears the secret shadow of 
death, — by what mysterious gravitation was it that my 
heart was drawn to thine ? " 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 

ScHERER says Byron " posed all his life long," and 
Matthew Arnold, catching Swinburne's phrase, speaks 
of Byron's " splendid and imperishable excellence of 
sincerity and strength." There is plenty of evidence 
to support both judgments. Byron himself, on looking 
in a mirror just after he had been sick, remarked to a 
friend, " How pale I look ! I should like, I think, to 
die of a consumption ; because then the women would 
all say, ' See that poor Byron, — how interesting he 
looks in djdng ! ' " Almost whenever he got a chance he 
exposed his suffering heart to a compassionate humanity 
and talked of himself without modesty or reticence ; 
hence what the Hon. Roden Noel has called his " gaudy 
charlatanry, blare of brass, and big bow-wowishness ; " 
— hence, too, when the suffering was real, what the 
Germans have aptly called WeltscJimerz. There was, 
on the other hand, a dauntless Viking spirit in Byron's 
breast, a sincere opposition to tyranny and bigotry. 
This very characteristic, which was his deepest and 
most abiding, which made him hate the sham and false- 
ness of himself as well as of others, is in both his life 
and his work the predominant note. It is on this, in 
fact, that his fame depends ; and, by strange irony, it 
was by this vigorous, defiant spirit, which scorned and 
resented correction, that he wrought his own downfall. 

No man in the whole history of English literature 
has become so suddenly famous as Byron did on the 
publication of Childe Harold^ and no poet has had 



362 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

heaped upon him such wrathful denunciation by the 
virtuous and the zealous misinformed. As a resvdt, he 
has figured in exaggerated, superlative terms. Because 
he was a peer, because he wrote excellent verses, be- 
cause he was beautiful, he has received absurd adula- 
tion. Because he made certain very serious moral and 
social slips, because he had the grim humor to pretend 
he was much worse than he really was, because scan- 
dal-mongers spread almost unimaginable lies about him, 
he was practically driven from England and has been, 
since his death, the victim of unjustified calumny. 

A further consequence of the exaggerated attitude 
towards Byron has been the falsification of the mere 
facts of his life, as well as of the inferences in regard to 
his character. He has been pictured, for instance, as a 
beautiful, black-haired Adonis, albeit with a club-foot, 
reclining, as he wrote verses, on a tombstone at Har- 
row, while his fellow scholars formed an admiring circle 
about him. As a matter of fact, however, when Byron 
was at Harrow, as Mr. Jeaffreson has pointed out, he 
was fat and shy, his hair was auburn, and he did not 
have, literally, a club-foot. Further, biographers have 
spoken of his vigorous, manly appearance when they 
could have found all sorts of proof that he was robust 
only in his arms and shoulders, that his legs were weak, 
and that his face, far from having the rugged vigor 
they imagine, was beautiful rather than handsome, 
femininely delicate in outline and expressive of femi- 
nine sensibilities. In later life he was accused of the 
blackest crimes in the calendar. Unfortunately he could 
not have cleared himself wholly if he had tried, but 
it must be kept in mind that he did not do half the 
things, good or bad, attributed to him. 




After the engraving by Finden from the painting by G. Sanders 



in 1807 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 363 

To call Byron a had man is, after all, beside the 
point. He was a weak man. Intensely passionate, badly 
brought up, spoiled by the adulations of society, consti- 
tutionally reckless of authority, he literally followed his 
impulses. This and the fact that he could be wholly 
possessed by rapidly succeeding and widely differing 
moods account in a large measure for his abrupt, seem- 
ingly inconsistent changes: his "silent rages," his affec- 
tion and hatred almost at the same moment, his reckless- 
ness and remorse, his sentimental melancholy, and his 
fundamental sincerity. It is futile, of course, to gloss over 
Byron's faults, but it must be remembered that his dis- 
creditable quarrel with his wife and his dissolute life 
in Venice, as well as the facts that he was a "noble 
lord " and had an adorable face, are no longer the only 
important features of his life or the cause of his great 
fame — however they may have brought about a news- 
paper notoriety in his day. What is far more significant 
now, when all the little creatures who shared his scandals 
have disappeared, is the evidence of genius, the Titanic 
soul in him. It throws light on the story of his life to 
know that Lady Caroline Lamb lost her head over him, 
but it is much more illuminating to know that Scott 
and Goethe, two of his greatest contemporaries, con- 
sidered him a very great genius. 

George Gordon Byron, born January 22, 1788, in 
Holies Street, London, was the only son of Captain Jack 
Byron and Catharine Gordon of Aberdeen. His descent 
can be traced from the Norman Buruns, recorded in the 
Domesday Book. Sir John Byron — " Sir John the 
little with the great beard " — was the first of the family 
to come by Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, granted 
him by Henry VIII, and the poet was the last owner. 



364 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Both of Byron's paternal grandparents, Admiral John 
Byron — known as " foul-weather Jack " — and Sophia 
Trevanion, were the grandchildren of the fourth Baron 
Berkeley, and may reasonably have inherited the vehe- 
ment Berkeley temperament. His father — known as 
" mad Jack " in the Horse Guards — first ran off with 
the Marchioness of Carmarthen, and soon after her death 
in 1784 hastened to repair his fortunes by suit to 
Catharine Gordon. She did not prove so rich as he had 
anticipated ; he soon exhausted what little she had, and, 
after five years, separated from her. The following year 
(1791) he died in France. 

Mrs. Byron was thus left with X150 a year and a 
three-year-old boy. Shortly after the poet's birth the 
parents had moved to Aberdeen, and there, among her 
friends, Mrs. Byron might have managed fairly well. 
But she was irritable, quick-tempered, and very unrea- 
sonable in the education of her child. He, on his part, 
though he had fits of affection for her, felt little filial 
respect. She spent half her time in caressing him and 
half in abusing him. In her more violent tempers she 
pursued him with poker and tongs and called him a 
" lame brat." In answer he developed his " silent rages," 
which kept the awestruck mother at a distance. Once 
he seized a knife and threatened to commit suicide. 
Another time the domestic feud was so great that Mrs. 
Byron hastened to the apothecary and told him not to 
sell her son any poison — only to find that the son had 
given like instructions in regard to her. 

At school Byron was too shy and rebellious to do 
very well. He was easier to lead, one of his teachers 
said, by a silken thread than by a cable. He first went 
to Mr. Bowers's school in Aberdeen from 1792-93, then 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 365 

was under tutors, and in 1794 entered the Aberdeen 
Grammar School. There was about the boy a girlish 
sensitiveness which continued all through his life and 
often, when people imagined him a hardened sinner, 
brought tears to his eyes. In 1798 by the death of his 
great-uncle — the " wicked old lord " — he inherited 
the Newstead estate and the family title ; and he was 
henceforth " Dominus " in the roll-call. So sensitive 
was he, however, that when " Dominus " was first read 
out he burst into tears. 

It is remarkable enough for any boy in his ninth 
year to fall in love. Even Dante was in his tenth. 
Byron, however, seems to have fallen in love in his 
ninth year more genuinely than many people manage 
in their twenty-fifth. Mary Duff was the young lady, 
and years later, when Mrs. Byron told him of Mary's 
marriage, Byron, after his manner, burst into tears. 
Besides this affair, moreover, he had two very serious 
passions before he went to college. Perhaps the tender- 
est affection of his whole life was for Margaret Parker 
in 1800. Whenever he spoke of her in later times he 
was lifted to his best self. It was due to her, he says, 
that he made his " first dash into poetry." Some believe 
that the tender lines to " Thyrza " are in memory of 
her. For she died when stiU a girl, and Byron thus lost 
his " good angel " when he was a mere boy. His next 
love was Mary Anne Chaworth, who lived at Annesley, 
near Newstead. In the summer of 1803, Byron, fat, 
with auburn locks combed straight over his forehead, 
paid awkward court to her. But he was a hopeless 
suitor. Miss Chaworth was older than he, and evidently 
felt no affection for her fat, lame, sentimental lover. 

Those who think Byron's whole life was a pose assert 



366 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

that he was from the first a professional lover and that 
his boyhood affairs were the preliminary steps of a 
despicable career. They assume that fickleness neces- 
sarily implies affectation. But Byron was too much a 
creature of impulses to pose in any but trivial matters. 
He pretended, to be sure, in the bitter humor of his 
later years, that he was a professional lover; but he 
was really wholly possessed, even in his later passions, 
by strong affection. Therein lies the tragedy of his 
life, for when the passion, true and vehement while it 
lasted, gave way to the swiftly succeeding impulse, 
he presented one of the best examples of sincere fickle- 
ness in history. If he had been merely " putting on," 
he would have mixed a little more comedy with the 
tragedy. 

In 1799 Byron's mother thought that the owner of 
Newstead should have a more fashionable education 
than either Aberdeen or Nottingham could offer. She 
therefore took him up to London and sent him to Dul- 
wich Academy. The head master. Dr. Glennie, seems to 
have had a sympathetic understanding of the boy, but all 
his efforts were frustrated by the descents of the hys- 
terical mother, who frequently took the child away for 
a couple of days and undid discipline with parties and 
caresses. 

In 1801 Byron was sent to Harrow. His lameness, 
the result of a contracted Achilles tendon, and much 
augmented in childhood by the brutal treatment of 
ignorant physicians, really prevented him from taking 
part in most sports, except riding and swimming. II 
has been pointed out that he played cricket, but MrJ 
Jeaffreson has pointed out that he played poorly. His 
sensitiveness in regard to this lameness lasted all througl 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 367 

Lis life. In childhood he had retorted to his mother's 
reproaches, " I was born so, mother ; " and he remem- 
bered the incident well enough to put it in his last 
work. The Deformed Transformed. On his death-bed 
he even asked to be blistered in such a way that his 
feet should not be exposed. Leigh Hunt says that in 
walking Byron hopped like a bird. Thus handicapped 
in athletics, fat and shy, impulsive and sullen by turns, 
Byron found Harrow at first an uncongenial home. 
" I was a most unpopular boy," he says, " but led lat- 
terly." His friendships, as always, were marked by a 
girlish sentiment ; he invariably referred to them as 
"passions." In his studies he made no mark. Indeed, 
he was considered poor in Latin, worse in Greek, and 
very poor in mathematics. In declamation he excelled. 
Most of his education, on the whole, seems to have 
come from his wide reading. 

In 1805 Byron went up to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. There he was never a congenial member. In 
the first place, his defiant spirit revolted against what he 
considered the bigotry and smug respectability of his 
superiors. His zeal for scholarship, moreover, did not in- 
crease in the presence of what he felt was pedantry. On 
the whole he found Cambridge a fitter place for revelry 
than study. He discovered that he could easily shock 
the worthies there, and this pleased him so much that 
he straightway acted as if shocking people was his cue. 
He kept a coach, valet, and dogs, — Boatswain, the great 
Newfoundland, and Nelson, the savage bulldog, — and 
finally he brought a bear to Cambridge, to " sit for a 
fellowship," he said. The worst side of Byron's early 
life is seen at Cambridge — his pride, conceit, and vulgar 
ostentation. It must be said in his favor, however, 



368 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

that lie was frolicsome rather than vicious. Underneath, 
moreover, there are plenty of evidences of sincerity — 
in his opposition to bigotry and cant and in his choice 
of friends. His best friend at college, as indeed his 
stanchest defender after his death, was John Cam Hob- 
house (Lord Broughton). 

Most of the violent excesses attributed to Byron dur- 
ing his years at Cambridge are not only unfounded, but 
against all fact. For while there he commenced the 
strict regimen which had so much effect on his life. He 
was short, five feet eight inches, and when he was nine- 
teen weighed over two hundred pounds. He then began 
— chiefly to relieve the physical discomfort, for he was 
almost too fat to walk on his feeble legs — a process 
which amounted nearly to starving. He gave up drink, 
and subsisted for weeks on biscuits and soda-water. To 
aid in reducing his flesh he took up various exercises, 
chiefly boxing, in which he excelled by impetuous onset 
rather than by skill or endurance. It was not until 
after a period of this discipline that there emerged the 
delicately beautiful Lord Byron who was the talk of 
London society. Such diet, naturally, soon played great 
havoc with his digestion. Occasionally, in a fit of 
hunger, he would gorge a mess of fish, rice, and pota- 
toes drenched with vinegar. He found, however, that 
his intellectual powers were so much improved with 
the reduction of flesh that he continued the severe diet 
through most of his life. In 1811, to relieve his suffer- 
ing, he began to take opium, and, though he never went 
to the excesses of De Quincey, he was never again wholly 
free from the habit. 

While at Cambridge Byron stepped into literary 
notice. He had collected and privately printed his 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 369 

juvenile verses in November, 1806, but on the sugges- 
tion of a friend that certain lines were too broad, he 
unhesitatingly (and rather unnaturally for him) burned 
the edition. The revised copy was printed in January, 
1807. His first public edition of verse, however, did 
not appear till March, 1807, when he brought out 
Hours of Idleness. These the Edinburgh Review 
attacked after its vituperative manner. Byron of course 
suffered by his studied conspicuousness at Cambridge. 
He therefore avoided the university and spent most of 
his time at Newstead or London till he had ready his 
famous reply, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 
The clumsy reviewer had reckoned without his host. 
For Byron, who had already written 380 lines of the 
satire, got it ready, by some alterations and additions, 
for publication by the spring of 1809. The attacks he 
makes are unjustified, and he later so regretted their 
extravagance that he suppressed the fifth edition ; but 
he had shown the reviewers that he too could " hunt a 
poetaster down," and, vastly more, he had taken a con- 
spicuous place in the literary world. 

Byron now found little to interest him at Cambridge, 
and left in the fall of 1808 without a degree. On 
March 13, 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords, 
but was disappointed at the cold reception accorded him, 
and soon resolved to go abroad. It was this spring that 
he was joined by several cronies who entered Newstead 
between a bear and a wolf, spent the days in boxing, 
fencing, riding, and pistol-shooting, and the nights in 
gaming, feasting, and ribald song. The young gentle- 
men dressed up as monks, and out of a skull found in 
the garden drank perdition to reviewers. But the stories 
of Byron's excesses at this time are exaggerated ; for 



370 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

while his friends were carousing he himself persisted in 
his severe diet, read a great deal, and sat up at night 
writing. Just before leaving for the Continent, he heard 
that the reviewers were preparing a second attack, so 
he wrote, in a humor prophetic of Don Juan, " I yet 
hope to light my pipe with it in Persia." 

On July 2 he sailed with his friend Hobhouse from 
Falmouth for Lisbon. Byron was abroad about two 
years, after which time he found himself in considerable 
debt and was forced to return. Most of his travels were 
in Spain and Greece, where he had numerous exciting 
and romantic adventures, though by no means all of 
those recorded in Childe Harold. The greatest feature 
of the trip, however, was the composition of the first 
two cantos of Childe Harold. He had also written some 
shorter poems — such as Maid of Athens — and a satire 
called Hints from Horace. This last he thought worth 
publication, but Murray, the publisher, preferred Childe 
Harold to the satire, and published it on February 29, 
1812. Byron, who as yet considered taking pay for his 
pen below him, gave the £600 to his friend Dallas. 

Byron literally " awoke and found himself famous." 
All London went mad over the young poet. When it 
was discovered that he was beautiful, with an expression 
of " dainty melancholy," when, as the Countess Guic- 
cioli hath it, " fame lit up his noble brow," he was 
courted and petted without end. Byron, who had once 
thought of calling the poem Childe Burun, was of 
course, in spirit at least, the unhappy, sentimental pil- 
grim of the poem, as he was in spirit the chief figure of 
all his works. And the possibility, the delightful danger 
that he might himself have had all the romantic expe- 
riences of the Childe fascinated not only young ladies. 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 371 

On the flood-tide of this unprecedented success Byron 
wrote in the next two years several of his narrative 
poems — the Giaour (1813), the Bride of Ahydos 
(1813), the Corsair (1814), and Lara (1814). Their 
vogue was phenomenal ; 14,000 copies of the Corsair 
sold in a single day ; Scott was completely eclipsed. 
Parasinaand. the Siege of Corinth (published in 1816) 
were also written in this period of popularity. 

Lady Caroline Lamb — " beautiful silliness," as Miss 
Milbanke called her — met the poet and wrote in her 
diary, " Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Whatever 
was the truth about poor Byron, whose head might very 
well be turned by this time, Lady Caroline, who herself 
deserved the judgment she made of him, determined to 
know him. For a few months she drew the young poet 
in her train. Then he managed to see what a scandal 
was brewing and turned her away with one of the most 
tactful letters he ever wrote. Her mother-in-law, Lady 
Melbourne, also feared a scandal and hoped, by intro- 
ducing her niece. Miss Anne Isabella Milbanke, as a 
possible match for Byron, to keep talk in the family. 

Miss Milbanke, however, was not thrust upon Byron. 
He fell deeply in love with her, and even after a refusal 
persisted for two years till he was accepted. It is con- 
venient to prove certain arguments by saying that Byron 
married her for money or, as he himself often asserted 
to her and others, out of spite ; but there is good evi- 
dence that such was not the case. Her fortune of X10,000 
and prospects of more when Lord Went worth died were 
scarcely inducements to the owner of Newstead, who at 
the time of his proposal had arranged to seR his estate 
for £140,000.- Whatever he said in obvious jest, good 
or ill natured, or whatever she in indignant and self- 



372 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

righteous old age reported to Mrs. Stowe is not much 
to the point. It is to the point, however, that in later 
years he often spoke of her, when he had good cause to 
speak otherwise, with great respect and even with affec- 
tion. In fact, he never in his best moments got over 
his love for her, and several times he hoped for a recon- 
ciliation. 

The marriage took place on January 2, 1815, and 
the young couple soon settled at 13, Piccadilly Terrace, 
London. They did not hve in great splendor, to be 
sure, for Byron was not yet clear of his debts. But they 
did live very happily — at least for eight months. Byron 
thus wrote to Moore in February : " My spouse and I 
agree to admiration. Swift says, ' No wise man ever 
married,' but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial 
of all possible future states." 

It is almost idle now, and certainly impossible in so 
short an account, to discuss all the details of the mis- 
erable quarrel which gave birth to so much gossip and 
slander. It is chiefly important to keep the characters 
of the two clearly in mind. Lady Byron was accom- 
plished, attractive, and conspicuous for her high ideals 
and purity of thought. Unfortunately she was hope- 
lessly dignified, coldly austere. She lacked, in fact, the 
two things most needed for companionship with Byron : 
a sense of humor and a sympathetic comprehension of 
his genius. She had very strict notions of piety, was 
easily shocked, and came to look on herself as an emis- 
sary direct from God for the regeneration of her wicked 
husband. Byron's sensitiveness and impulsiveness, 
which he had learned to mask under cynicism and bit- 
ter jesting, have already been noted. By August, 1815, 
when his diet of biscuits and soda-water and his doses of 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 373 

laudanum had attacked his digestion, he was unwontedly 
irritable. Above all must be remembered his great 
selfishness — even Hobhouse admits that ; an uncon- 
scious, insatiable selfishness. He could bid those 

" Whose agouies are evils of a day ' ' 

" Control 
In their shut breasts their petty misery; " 

he could give generously to the poor and his friends ; 
he could give himself gladly to the cause of freedom : 
but always there stepped in the spirit of the melancholy 
Childe Harold, to exact the uttermost farthing of con- 
solation ; and when this was denied him by the unfeel- 
ing world, as it must always be, the spirit of Don Juan 
followed, jesting bitterly. 

It is not necessary, then, as some have thought, to 
invent a great crime which should suddenly come be- 
tween Byron and his wife. The ill-feeling developed 
slowly after August. In the first place, Byron talked 
of a trip abroad, and said brutally, to a wife with no 
sense of humor, that if she could not accompany him 
he should go without her. He began, moreover, to teU 
various tales of his wickedness. When he saw this 
shocked her serious righteousness, he was immensely 
amused. Another grievance was his absence from meals. 
He could not bear to sit through a long repast while 
his fare consisted of the aforesaid biscuits and soda- 
water ; but this action she very reasonably construed 
as the expression of a dislike for her. Still another 
trouble was religious dissension. " He broke me," she 
said afterward with a tragic seriousness almost amusing 
to-day, " on the rock of predestination." Then, too, those 
" silent rages " of his boyhood continued, and no doubt 
a look could do as much injury as anything he said. 



374 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Such silence, moreover, was often followed by violent 
outbursts of temper, as when he dashed a watch to 
pieces on the hearth and then attacked the broken, 
unresisting timepiece with a poker. But one cannot 
help being amused, even if one must condemn Byron's 
conduct, when there enters to his lordship his dignified 
lady with the question, " Byron, am I in the way ? " 
and he replies, " Damnably! " As a writer in the Quar- 
terly Review for October, 1869, says, " His monomania 
lay in being an impossible sinner, and hers in being 
an impossible saint." But Byron was no doubt chiefly 
at fault. His daughter Ada was born on the 10th of 
December, 1815, and just at a time when Lady Byron 
deserved every consideration he was brutally inconsid- 
erate. She generously thought him mad. 

It is worth noting, however, that there was no talk 
of a separation when, on January 15, 1816, Lady Byron 
went north to Kirkby Mallory to visit her parents. 
The letters were still affectionate. A few days later, 
when she heard from a physician that Byron was not 
mad, she first resolved on a separation ; for she asserted 
that what he had said and done, if he was in his right 
senses, was unpardonable. At first her relatives on both 
sides urged reconciliation, and lawyers said there were 
not sufficient grounds for divorce. A few weeks after- 
wards, however, was discovered or invented the addi- 
tional evidence which convinced even lawyers that a 
separation was necessary. The matter did not come to 
public trial ; Byron acquiesced, though he never knew, 
he asserted, what the mysterious additional evidence 
was. His silence, however, convicted him in the eyes 
of society, which jumped to all sorts of conclusions and 
showed an unsurpassed fertility of invention. The pro- 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 375 

posal of separation was made by Lady Byron's father 
on February 2, 1816, and the deed signed on April 22. 

Byron's actions during the spring throw much light 
on his character. On the 8th of March he wrote to 
Moore : " I do not believe — and I must say it, in the 
very dregs of all this bitter business — that there was 
ever a better, or even a brighter, a kinder, or a more 
amiable and agreeable being than Lady Byron. I never 
had, nor can have, any reproach to make of her while 
with me. Where there is blame, it belongs to myself ; 
and, if I cannot redeem, I must bear it." Yet almost 
at the same time he wrote the verses beginning " Fare 
thee well." He was no doubt strangely sincere when 
he wrote them ; but he misrepresented the whole case 
when he allowed them to be published, for in them he 
poses before the world as a " sad true lover " deserted 
by his wife. His truer and more frequent mood was 
that of the letter to Moore. Similarly, in later times 
he usually spoke of her with respect and affection, but 
when he relapsed into sentimentality or vulgarity he 
attacked her in verse — notably in the Dream and in 
Don Juan^ where he called her his "moral Clytem- 
nestra" and "Miss Millpond." Certainly the worst thing 
he did was to contract a connection in the very spring 
of 1816 with Jane Clermont, the stepsister of Shel- 
ley's wife, Mary Godwin. A year later she bore him 
a daughter, AUegra, who died, at the age of five, in an 
Italian convent. 

The storm of popular imprecation which followed 
Byron's separation from Lady Byron was as great as 
the popular enthusiasm for him four years before, 
though not quite so cyclonic. Certain people had found 
dangerous theology, they thought, in Childe Harold^ 



376 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS ' • 

and many who believed Byron actually did what the 
hero of the poem was made to do, if not quite indig- 
nant, were nevertheless shocked. Moreover, he had been 
applauding Napoleon while nine-tenths of England 
were in ecstasy over Wellington. He was, furthermore, 
tmpopular with men, who disliked, on the one hand, 
his conspicuous favor among their women, and, on the 
other, his ostentatious disapproval of their pheasant- 
shooting and of their Anglo-Saxon tastes for food and 
drink. In 1816, then, when what they considered his 
unspeakable villanies were on every tongue, nearly all 
England turned against him. " Far worse men than he," 
says the Hon. Roden Noel, ..." made a queer sort of 
vicarious atonement for their own vices by an immod- 
erate and unjust condemnation of his. He became their 
whipping-boy." Those who found Nero too mild a com- 
parison frankly likened him to Satan. 

On the 25th of April, 1816, Byron left England 
with a mutual hatred. " I felt," he said, " that if what 
was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, 
I was unfit for England ; if false, England was unfit for 
me." He went via the Rhine to Geneva, where he was 
joined by the Shelleys. 

The influence of Shelley on Byron was good. Byron 
was inspired by Shelley's ardor to a studious, intellec- 
tual life, and while at Geneva did much of his best 
work. He wrote the third canto of CMlde Harold^ 
Prometheus^ the Prisoner of Chillon (in two days, 
while on a tour of the lake with Shelley), part of Man- 
fred, and the stanzas to his stepsister, Augusta. This 
sister's unwavering faith in him and her frank rebuke 
of his errors, as well as his affection for her, present 
one of the pleasantest pictures in his life. 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 377 

In October Byron crossed the Alps with Hobhouse 
and proceeded via Milan and Verona to Venice. Now 
comes the most miserable chapter of his life. At Venice 
he plunged into the worst sort of dissipation, to a degree 
that shocked even the Venetians. He gave up, moreover, 
his habit of starving himself. At first he became coarse 
and fat ; then his overstrained constitution gave way. 

When he had lived thus for about a year, enfeebled 
health, disgust, and affection for the young Countess 
Guiccioli, who lived at Ravenna, brought him back to 
his better self. His connection with Theresa Guiccioli, 
who ran off with him to Venice, was culpable enough, to 
be sure, but it kept him clear of further vice. It is 
great credit to the Countess that she discovered his bet- 
ter qualities, loved him for them, and by her love kept 
them uppermost in him for the remainder of his life. 
The best evidence of his good impulses at this time is, 
besides his return to sobriety, his generosity to the poor, 
his many individual acts of kindness, and his interest 
in the cause of Italian freedom. The Carbonari made 
him the chief of the Mericani, or fighting troops. 

For the rest of his stay in Italy Byron was at Venice, 
Ravenna, Pisa, whither SheUey attracted him, and 
Genoa. His literary output during these six years in 
Italy was enormous. Even at Venice he wrote a great 
deal. In 1817, besides finishing Manfred^ he composed 
the Lament of Tasso; in 1818, JBeppo; and in 1819, 
Mazeppa and the first two cantos of his greatest work, 
Don Juan. In it the character of the mature Byron is 
excellently revealed : the vigorous Viking spirit ; the 
flashing satirist ; the bitter jester ; the occasionally vul- 
gar intriguer ; and the romantic soul, with its love of 
freedom and nature. In 1821, his biggest year, he pro- 



378 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

duced cantos iii-v of Don Juan, Marino Faliero, 
Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and Cain. 

Byron had long since got over his scruples about 
taking money for his publications. In all he received 
from Murray X12,580 for his writings between 1816 
and 1821. By the latter date, moreover, he was very 
comfortably off. Newstead had at last been sold, in 
1818 ; and in 1822, on the death of Lady Noel, Byron 
came in for a half share of the Wentworth property, 
on his taking the name of Noel. For the last two years 
of his life, therefore, he signed " George Gordon Noel 
Byron." 

Byron's Pisan days, when he lived at the Palazzo 
Lanfranchi, present the pleasantest picture of his Italian 
life. There he lived quietly in the excellent company of 
Shelley and his friends, chief among whom were Tre- 
lawny, who accompanied Byron to Greece, Williams, who 
was drowned with SheUey, Tom Medwin, a schoolfellow 
of Shelley's, and Mrs. Shelley. At the palazzo the 
Counts Gamba, father and son, and the daughter, the 
Countess Guiccioli, lived with Byron till their sym- 
pathy with the Carbonari brought the authorities down 
on them. Byron, who had been chief of the Mericani 
at Ravenna, was still an agitator of the liberal cause. 
He had written : " The king-times are fast finishing ! 
there will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist, 
but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live 
to see it, but I foresee it." Such declarations and the 
enthusiasm he stirred up among the common people soon 
set the police of Pisa as weU as of Eavenna against him. 

There is an amusing story of a row which grew out 
of this animosity. While Byron and his friends were 
returning to Pisa on horseback from a park where they 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 379 

went to practice pistol-shooting, a trooper rode rather 
roughly through them and nearly unhorsed an Irishman, 
one Taafe, who indignantly called Byron's attention 
to the insult. Byron put spurs to his horse and chased 
the offender through the gates of Pisa. As the trooper 
clattered past the Palazzo Lanfranchi one of the servants 
rushed out and wounded him with a stable fork. The 
poet, on returning to the gates, found that the guard 
had mustered before the rest of his party could get 
through, and that in the ensuing scufSe Shelley had re- 
ceived a sabre-cut on the head, and Taafe, well in the 
rear, the reproaches of the Countess and Mrs. Shelley. 

In 1822 began Byron's connection with Leigh Hunt's 
Liberal. Byron had long felt a desire for a periodical 
at his command. It was to start this venture that he in- 
vited Hunt to Italy. Byron was to own the paper ; Hunt, 
well known for his daring liberalism, was to edit it. 
Hunt arrived at Leghorn in the summer of 1821, just 
before Shelley's death by drowning, and, together with 
Mrs. Hunt and many little Hunts, took up his dwelling 
on the ground floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi. Prom 
the first, however, the two writers did not get along 
well. Hunt was by this time a querulous, mercenary 
champion of liberty, and the cockney of him exasperated 
Byron. The Liberal proved to be unsuccessful and 
short-lived. Its best contributions were from Byron : 
The Vision of Judgment (1822), Heaven and Earth 
(1822), and Morgante Maggiore (1823). 

In the Villa Saluzzo, at Albaro, about a mile outside 
of Genoa, Byron wrote a great deal. Cantos iv-xvi of 
Don Juan were published in 1823 and 1824. To the 
former year also belong: Werner., The Age of Bronze, 
and The Island ; to the latter, The Deformed Trans- 



380 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

formed and his Parliamentary Speeches made in 
1809. 

Byron was, however, distinctly a spirit of action. He 
often spoke of his writing as mere play, to be given up 
when serions work began. " Do people think,'' he said 
to Trelawny in Greece, " that ... I came to Greece 
to scribble more nonsense ? I will show them I can do 
something better. I wish I had never written a line, to 
have it cast in my teeth at every turn. Let 's have a 
swim." In 1823 the struggle of the Greeks against the 
Turks attracted him. They needed money, which he 
went about raising, giving unsparingly of his own, and 
they needed brave, intelligent leaders. He dreamed per- 
haps of great glory in this last enterprise of his ; he 
could rarely forget himself and the spectacular. Still, 
when his whole life is taken into account, this effort to 
redeem his shattered character is greatly to his credit. 
He had little to sacrifice, to be sure, and much to gain, 
— but it is perhaps fairer to say that he felt, in the bot- 
tom of his vigorous heart, that he had still a high ideal 
to serve. How near he came to great gain may be 
guessed from Trelawny's remark that " had Byron lived 
to reach Salona as commissioner of the [English] loan, 
the dispenser of a million crowns would have been 
offered a golden one." 

Setting out with Trelawny and the younger Gamba 
in July, 1823, Byron went first to Cephalonia, where he 
spent six months, to make sure how and where he should 
lend his services. It was during this time that, on a 
visit to Ithaca, he was taken with such violent indiges- 
tion, while he was being done especial honor as chief 
guest at a monastery, that he seized a torch, cursed the 
Abbot in virulent Italian, and rushed from the hall. 



GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON 381 

Later, in his fury, he threw furniture at his friends who 
sought to pacify him. 

On arriving at Missolonghi on January 4, 1824, he 
was received with honor by Mavrocordatos, the Greek 
chieftain, and was made Archistrategos (commanderr 
in-chief) of Marco Bozzaris's Suliotes. He did not see 
actual fighting in Greece, but the record of his services 
there does him great credit. He kept in good control a 
very rebellious band, the Suliotes, and did, besides, many 
little acts of kindness to prisoners and friends. There 
must have been something both magnificent and lovable 
about his appearance and manner. The same man who 
had captivated London society and played havoc with a 
dozen hearts inspired soldiers with zeal and affection 
and filled all who came in touch with him latterly, from 
the poet Shelley to the fighter Trelawny, with unbounded 
admiration. Hardened warriors wept by his death-bed, 
and aU Greece went into mourning. 

The story of Byron's last days can be briefly told. 
On February 15 began a series of epileptic fits ; on 
April 11 he was taken with fever ; on the 18th he spoke 
his last words, " Now I shall go to sleep ; " and on the 
19th he died, in his thirty-seventh year. His remains 
were taken to England ; but, since the Dean of West- 
minster refused them burial in the Abbey, they were 
placed in the family vault of Hucknall - Torkard 
Church, near Newstead. The small gentry of Notting- 
ham drew their prudish skirts about them, but Byron's 
friends, the poor, flocked in crowds to his grave. 

In looking back over the life of Byron one feels that 
he was just beginning to find himself — to live down 
the sentimental poseur in him and to reveal the strong, 
sincere spirit underneath — when he was cut short. 



382 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

In the shipwreck of his life there rises, as in Don 
Juan^ 

" the bubbling cry 
Of some strong swimmer in his agony." 

It must be admitted that Byron was always an image- 
breaker ; he was strong only in destruction ; he had no 
hopeful theory. " When he thinks," said Goethe, " he 
is a child." Byron himself wrote in 1813 : "I have sim- 
plified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing 
governments." But his defiance, it must be remembered, 
was at its best splendidly sincere, full of " imperishable 
strength," and the images he shattered were often idols 
of Baal. " To teU him not to fight," says Professor 
Nichol, " was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, or 
Shelley not to sing." In his nobler moments and at 
what he finally achieved, Byron was the better seK of 
his heroes : Harold, Don Juan, Cain, Manfred, Bonni- 
vard — the 

" Eternal spirit of the chainless mind." 

His friend Shelley, who understood what was best in 
him, called him " the Pilgrim of Eternity." 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

" Mad Shelley," " the immortal child," " a crea- 
ture of impetuous breath," " a beautiful and ineffectual 
angel," — these are some of the epithets that have been 
applied to Shelley. And in them lies what is most strik- 
ing in his personality : his visionary idealism, his in- 
genuous earnestness, his passionate love of beauty and 
truth, his high ethereal spirit, unconscious of bodily 
existence. He described himself as " A pardlike spirit 
beautiful and swift." His poetry is similarly individual; 
it has been called a "lyrical cry." He himself is his 
" Cloud," who sings, — 

" I bind the sun's throne with a burning zone, 
And the moon's with a girdle of pearl ; 
The volcanoes are dim and the stars reel and swim, 
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl." 

He himself is the leaf borne along the " Wild West 
Wind; " he is his " Skylark " — an " unbodied joy " — 

" In the golden lightning 
Of the sunken sun." 

It is the coursers of his own Promethean mind who 
are " wont to respire " 

" On the brink of the night and the morning," 

and to drink of "the whirlwind's stream." 

On August 4, 1792, Percy Bysshe Shelley, the son 
of Sir Timothy Shelley and Elizabeth Pilfold, was born 
at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex. His father, 
a stanch Whig in the House of Commons, was fairly 



384 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

obsessed by conventional respectability and a common- 
place belief in tradition — qualities which must have 
early provoked the opposition of his meteor-spirited son. 
Shelley's mother left the boy an inheritance of her great 
beauty ; the immediate attention of all was attracted by 
his slender frame, deep blue eyes, ruddy complexion, 
and curling golden brown hair. This boyish appear- 
ance he retained all through life, even though his hair 
turned prematurely gray. Trelawny describes him at 
their first meeting, only two years before Shelley's 
death, as " blushing like a girl." 

Shy, impulsive, and enthusiastic for studies not in 
the curriculum, Shelley did not get along well at school. 
After two years at Sion House Academy, Isleworth, he 
was sent, when twelve years old, to Eton. Among his 
fellows he was conspicuously abnormal. He delighted 
not in their sports, his shyness precluded companionship 
except with one or two, and his independent nature 
rebelled openly against the system of fagging. " Mad 
Shelley," the boys dubbed him ; he was " surrounded," 
says one of his schoolfellows, " hooted, baited like a 
maddened bull." Yet he was preparing himself in his 
own way — by private reading and experiments in sci- 
ence, forbidden as a dangerous study for the young. 
One of his experiments was to set fire with a burning- 
glass to a valued old oak. There are some lines in the 
Revolt of Islam descriptive of these Eton days — lines 
ringing with Miltonic prophecy of his high calling : — 

" And from that hour did I with earnest thought 
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore, 
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught 
I cared to learn, but from that secret store 
Wrought linked armor for my soul, before 
It might walk forth to war among mankind." 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 385 

Shelley's literary efforts began early. In childhood 
lie scribbled verses with fluency, and he delighted in 
amusing his sisters with strange tales or in leading 
them through imaginary romantic escapades. His first 
published book was the novel Zastrozzi, an extravagant 
reflection of the wild romances he had been reading, 
especially those of Mrs. Radcliffe and Godwin. Zas- 
trozzi came out just before he left Eton and was fol- 
lowed in the fall of the same year (1810) by a similar 
romance, St. Irvyne or the liosicrucian. The Original 
Poetry hy Victor and Cazire was another work of that 
year. 

From Eton Shelley went to University College, Ox- 
ford, in 1810. Of his short life there a most interesting 
account is given by his constant companion, Thomas 
Jefferson Hogg. The two were thrown together the first 
night at supper, continued their discourses in Hogg's 
room, and became forthwith inseparable. In Shelley's 
rooms, where they usually took supper, everything was 
in confusion : retorts supported by costly books, beakers 
used alternately for tea and aqua regia^ stains on furni- 
ture and carpet — and in the midst of it Percy Bysshe 
SheUey, radiant, transfigured with enthusiasm, discuss- 
ing vehemently in his shrill voice the wonders of science 
or the perfectibility of man. Hogg's account is full of 
Shelley's peculiarities — eccentricities which have be- 
come familiar to all : how he stepped on his hands when 
going upstairs ; how he read as he walked, whether in 
the country or the crowded streets of London ; how he 
slept after supper on the hearth-rug, with his little round 
head exposed to the heat of a blazing fire ; how, in spite 
of his occasional awkwardness, " he would often glide 
without collision through a crowded assembly." Byron 



386 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

compared him to a snake — an animal wLicli always had 
a strange fascination for Shelley. But Hogg saw beyond 
the eccentricities : he has dwelt lovingly on Shelley's 
generosity and quick sympathy, on his nobility of char- 
acter and veneration for true greatness. 

Hogg's testimony, moreover, is of the greater value 
because it throws light on Shelley's atheism. The dread 
word atheist is so apt to inspire, even to-day, the horror 
which bristled in the hearts of the Oxford powers that 
it is necessary to see just what kind of atheist Shelley 
was. " I never could discern in him any more than two 
fixed principles," says Hogg. " The first was a strong 
irrepressible love of liberty ; of liberty in the abstract. 
. . . The second was an equally ardent love of toleration 
of all opinions, but more especially of religious opinions. 
. . . He felt an intense abhorrence of persecution of 
every kind, public or private." Add to this the further 
testimony : " Shelley was actually offended at a coarse 
or awkward jest, especially if it were immodest or un- 
cleanly." And as a third consideration : " In no indi- 
vidual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more com- 
pletely developed than in Shelley. "His atheism, then, was 
not a blind revolt of immorality against traditions and 
customs, as some have thought ; it was the philosophy 
of a man who, inspired by the French Revolution, set 
up Reason as his guide. He had indeed a profound 
reverence for the divine spirit of " nature," or of "neces- 
sity," the very devotion to which, he would have put it, 
forbade his using for it the name of God, a word asso- 
ciated through many centuries with the tyranny and 
bigotry and sordid selfishness of the church. For the 
personality of Christ he had a deep veneration ; for the 
authority of dogmatic Christianity, for institutionalism, 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 387 

lie had complete contempt. As a result, because his 
premises were more defective than his noble aspirations, 
and because he was possessed by a militant ardor, he 
went in his youth to an extreme — to atheism. Yet not 
altogether unreasonably : to Trelawny, who in the last 
year of Shelley's life asked him why he called himself 
an atheist, he replied : " It is a good word of abuse to 
stop discussion, a painted devil to frighten the foolish, 
a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to 
express my abhorrence of superstition. I took up the 
word as a knight takes up a gauntlet in defiance of 
injustice." 

When these revolutionary views of Shelley's finally 
appeared in printed form, February, 1811, in a pam- 
phlet called The Necessity of Atheism^ he was peremp- 
torily asked by the authorities whether he had written 
the booklet. His whole spirit, however, rebelled against 
what seemed to him rude inquisitorial arrogance ; he 
refused to answer, and together with his friend Hogg, 
who too would not commit himself, he was expelled 
March 25, 1811. Hogg tells how Shelley sat with his 
head in his hands, crying " Expelled! expelled ! " Yet 
it was not so much his own misfortune that depressed 
him as the thought that there could exist in England 
an institution where a man should be punished for 
daring to think. With Hogg he took lodgings in Lon- 
don, his father having denied him Field Place unless 
he would separate from his free-thinking friend. 

Shelley's resistance to tyranny and his support of 
the downtrodden soon led him into difficulties more 
serious than expulsion from college. When he was 
living with Hogg in London his sisters were in a school 
at Clapham, and while visiting them he became ac- 



388 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

quainted with Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old 
daughter of a wealthy, retired innkeeper. The acquaint- 
ance developed a correspondence ; that in turn a close 
friendship. Harriet fell hopelessly in love with Shel- 
ley, and he, a very emotional youth of nineteen, half 
returned the affection. Soon her letters spoke of per- 
secution at home, and the effect on Shelley was imme- 
diate ; his spark of passion was fanned by his sympathy 
for the wronged into a considerable flame, and he 
offered, half chivalrously, to marry her — she need only 
to call him if the domestic conditions could not be en- 
dured. Soon she did call him ; without a moment's 
hesitation he joined her, took her to Edinburgh, and 
there married her, August 28, 1811, under the Scotch 
law. On March 24, 1814, they were again married in 
London. 

There is no doubt that Shelley failed to fmd in Har- 
riet the finely tempered spirit that his poetic nature 
craved. Yet his precipitate action was quite consistent 
with his impetuous, generous character. He had been 
for the most part nurtured on idealistic dreams, and for 
a while all went well enough. Accompanied by a ubi- 
quitous sister-in-law, Eliza Westbrook, he and his wife 
visited Hogg, who was now studying law in York. 
York Minster incidentally called from the young icono- 
clast the comment, — a " gigantic pile of superstition." 
From York they traveled to Keswick, where Shelley 
called on Southey, whose poetry had fascinated him in 
boyhood. Thence the young couple went to Ireland, 
where Shelley threw himself with characteristic ardor 
into the cause of Catholic emancipation. He wrote a 
pamphlet, which he distributed broadcast : sometimes 
he threw it from the balcony of his dwelling and some- 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 389 

times, much to Harriet's amusement, stuck it in the 
hoods of women's capes on the street. Conscious of 
failure, however, he left for Wales ; was soon at Lyn- 
mouth, Devon, where he amused himself by setting 
adrift on Bristol Channel bottled copies of his pamphlet ; 
and finally returned, after a little more than a year's 
absence, to London. 

Shelley's father was irate. His son and heir had 
attained, to his way of thinking, an average of zero. 
To be expelled from Oxford for atheism was bad 
enough ; to elope with an innkeeper's daughter was an 
intolerable offense. Shelley's allowance of <£200 a year, 
which he had been receiving for some time, was now 
cut off, and only the benevolence of his maternal uncle, 
Captain Pilfold, rescued him from abject poverty. Yet 
the lack of funds was small deprivation to Shelley. 
Whenever he had money he gave much to the poor 
and his friends. For himself he knew few bodily 
needs : already he had begun his abstemious vegetaiian 
habits. To Hogg's entreaties to join him in a pudding, 
he replied that " a pudding was a prejudice." If hun- 
ger assailed him in the public street, he would dive 
into a bake-shop, purchase a roll, and proceed down 
the street, book in hand, munching as he went. 

In February, 1813, Queen Mab^ chiefly written 
when he was eighteen, was finished and printed for 
private distribution. Shelley later spoke of it as " vil- 
lanous trash," and never intended to include it among 
his published works. In any account of his life, how- 
ever, it has a twofold importance : as his first con- 
siderable work of any excellence, and as an exposition 
of his atheism. The idealistic, visionary philosophy, 
regardless of human limitations, ignorant that most 



390 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

men were incapable of his Ariel-flight, could be well 
expressed only in poetry ; it was in fact a poetic philo- 
sophy, and as such most characteristic of Shelley. 

An important figure, in the person of William God- 
win, whose anarchistic principles, expounded in his 
Political Justice, had largely influenced the philosophy 
of Queen Mob, now appears in Shelley's life. Shelley 
wrote to Godwin from Keswick, a correspondence grew 
up, and later, in London, a close intimacy. Yet more 
significant in the young poet's life was Mary Woll- 
stonecraf t Godwin, the pale daughter with the " piercing 
look." For some time she and Shelley never actually 
met, though they were well known to each other by hear- 
say ; but one eventful afternoon, when Shelley called 
at Godwin's house, it is said, the door was opened by 
her, a feminine voice cried, " Shelley ! " and on the 
instant came reply, " Mary ! " 

Meanwhile domestic peace had departed from the 
Shelley household. Sister-in-law Eliza had excited 
Percy's " unbounded abhorrence ; " Harriet and Shelley 
had a petty quarrel, Harriet left her home, and the 
youthful husband and father was plunged again into 
dejection. His fair dreams — Oxford and Harriet — 
had alike lost lustre. In Mary Godwin only did he find 
a kindred spirit — the upshot of all which was that 
Shelley, defying sacred as well as social laws, or, as he 
would have put it, unshackled by such traditional su- 
perstitions as marriage rites, eloped with her on July 
28, 1814. 

The fugitive couple crossed to France and Switzer- 
land, but after six weeks returned to London. Here 
poverty and the inconsistent indignation of the anar- 
chist Godwin for a while beset them. The following 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 391 

January (1815), however, Shelley's grandfather died, 
leaving considerable property. Shelley, who went imme- 
diately to Field Place to claim his share of the inher- 
itance, was refused admittance by the still wrathful 
parent; but he treated the repulse with admirable com- 
posure, sat on the steps, and read Comus. Finally he 
was allowed .£1000 annually, and affairs for a while 
took a brighter turn. It was during the following sum- 
mer, while living at Bishopsgate, on the borders of 
Windsor Park, that he composed Alastor. 

Godwin, however, although he willingly enough ac- 
cepted financial aid, would not yet tolerate Shelley as 
his son-in-law. A despicable figure he made, as Matthew 
Arnold puts it, " preaching and holding the hat." Shel- 
ley, indignant, once more left England, in May, 1816, 
and spent the summer at Geneva, chiefly in the com- 
pany of Lord Byron. He was back again in October, 
however, only to meet the severest catastrophe of his 
life. In December the body of Harriet was found in 
the Serpentine. Further, as if to fill full the cup of his 
dejection, suit for the guardianship of Harriet's chil- 
dren was brought against him ; a suit in which the 
avowed atheist stood no chance against indignant 
orthodoxy. Indeed, about the only comfort derived 
from the whole winter was a reconciliation with God- 
win, Mary and Shelley having been formally married 
on December 30, 1816. 

It would be pleasant to pass quickly over Shelley's 
relations to Harriet, the least attractive side of his 
life. Such offenses as his are in themselves of course to 
be wholly condemned ; but at the same time, without 
condoning the act, it is important to remember the kind 
of man he was. When he was in Switzerland with 



392 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Mary he urged Harriet to join them — a remarkable 
invitation, to be sure, but by its ridiculous impossibility 
the best proof of his utter failure to comprehend what 
was due his wife. So sensitive a man as Shelley could 
never have written such a letter in jest or brutality ; he 
simply did not understand why things should not be so. 
In forming an opinion of him, moreover, one must take 
into account his scrupulous personal purity. Leigh 
Hunt attacks with vehemence Shelley's severest de- 
nouncers, "the collegiate refusers of argument and the 
conventional sowers of wild oats." For from these two 
things — conventional moral cant and youthful dissipa- 
tion followed by so-called respectability — Shelley re- 
volted completely. 

No one, of course, can pardon Shelley just because 
he held strange theories and lived up to them. Yet his 
breaking of the most sacred conventions, it must be em- 
phasized, was not the result of a libertine passion. He 
believed sincerely in what he did. For this consistent 
madness he had to pay by a twofold suffering : in re- 
morse over the wretched suicide with which he was in- 
extricably tangled, and in the loss of his two children, 
whom he passionately loved. " The conventions which 
he despised and treated like the dust beneath his feet," 
comments J. A. Symonds, " were found in this most 
cruel crisis to be a rock on which his very heart was 
broken." 

During the chancery suit for his children Shelley 
lived with Mary at Great Marlow, on the Thames. 
All through these sad days he was a ministering angel 
among the poor of the neighborhood. He kept a list of 
the needy, whom he relieved out of his own pocket ; he 
visited the sick in their beds ; and once, Leigh Hunt 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 393 

tells us, he carried a sick woman whom he found on 
Hampstead Heath from door to door seeking to find 
shelter until he brought her to Hunt's house, where 
she was cared for. Nor was his generosity only to the 
poor. His friend Peacock, the novelist, received annu- 
ally XlOO ; once he gave Leigh Hunt X1400 ; and he 
continued to pay Godwin's debts, in all about £6000. 

In spite of dejection, however, SheUey's life at Great 
Marlow was not without its compensations. It was at 
this time that he became intimate with Hunt and 
Lamb. The former gives an amusing account of Shel- 
ley's games with the Hunt children, how he would sail 
paper boats with them, or play at " frightful creatures," 
from which pastime they snatched a " fearful joy." 
Through Hunt he met Hazlitt and Keats, but neither 
of them took to him so kindly as he to them ; Keats 
especially stood off from the aristocracy that went with 
Shelley's name. 

The year at Great Marlow, too, brought added liter- 
ary store from the poet. He finished his long poem of 
Laon and Cythna (revised and published January, 
1818, as the Revolt of Islam) while floating in his boat 
under the beech groves by the Thames. Besides this, 
the poem Mont Blanc and the Hymn to Intellectual 
Beauty^ conceived during his second visit to Switzer- 
land, were written ; and he began Prince Athanase (un- 
finished) and Rosalind and Helen (finished in Italy). 

Early in the spring of 1818 Shelley left England 
behind him forever. His broken health — he had been 
threatened with consumption — and the unfortunate 
events of the past year, together with urgent invitations 
from Lord Byron, who was in Venice, were the chief 
causes of his going. 



394 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The remaining four years of Shelley's life may be 
conveniently divided into two periods : the first year 
and a half, during which his places of residence were 
numerous and unsettled ; and the two years and a half 
at Pisa and Lerici. He and his party arrived at Milan 
early in April, and, after a few weeks at Como and a 
month's visit to the Gisbornes at Leghorn, took up 
summer residence at the Bagni di Lucca. During the 
fall they occupied, at Byron's invitation, his vacant villa 
at Este in the Euganean Hills, overlooking Padua, 
Venice, and " the waveless plain of Lombardy." Since 
the severity of a winter in North Italy was feared, on 
account of Shelley's poor health, he and his wife jour- 
neyed via Rome to Naples. Though he shunned crowds 
or strangers, Shelley depended for cheerfulness on two 
or three companions ; and the lack thereof at Naples, 
together with continued illness, threw him into low 
spirits. Only occasional moments — such as visits to 
Paestum or Pompeii, where he heard 

** The mountain's slumberons voice at intervals 
Thrill through those roofless halls" — 

relieved the monotony of his loneliness. " I could," he 
says in the Stanzas written in Dejection, 

" lie down like a tired child, 
And weep away the life of care 
Which I have borne and yet must bear." 

Spring in Rome was a much happier time. Antiquity 
spoke eloquently to Shelley's heart ; sitting among the 
ruined baths of Caracalla, wandering about the Colos- 
seum, or treading the spring flowers of the Campagna, 
he fashioned some of his greatest verse, — Prometheus 
and The Cenci. The following summer was spent at 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 395 

Leghorn, and the fall at Florence, where the son who 
inherited the family estates. Sir Percy Florence Shelley, 
was born. Finally he took up residence early in 1820 
at Pisa. 

Under the sunny Italian sky Shelley soon grew 
stronger, and with his strength came his best literary 
work. First, at Lucca he finished Rosalind and Helen, 
at his wife's request, and translated Plato's Banquet. A 
visit to Venice in August, 1818, inspired Jidlan and 
Madallo, in which are given portraits of the author and 
Byron. At Este he wrote those melodious octosyllabics. 
Among the Euganean Hills, and began Prometheus 
Unbound ; and Naples at least inspired the immortal 
Stanzas. But the year 1819 was his banner-year. In 
it at Rome, Leghorn, and Florence he finished The 
Cenci, nearly completed Prometheus, wrote the Mask 
of Anarchy, translated Euripides's The Cyclops, and 
sang many of his incomparable lyrics, chief of which 
are the Indian Serenade and the Ode to the West 
Wind. His manner of composition, usually in the open 
air, was truly poetical. We remember Alastor, written 
under the great trees of Windsor Park, and the Revolt 
of Islam, in a boat on the Thames ; we have seen him 
among the ruins of Rome and on the Bay of Naples ; 
at Pisa he did most of his work on the roof, with only 
a glass covering between him and the scorching Italian 
sun. The Ode to the West Wind was "conceived and 
chiefly written," he says in the introductory note, " in 
a wood that skirts the Arno," in communion with the 
whirling leaves and tempestuous gusts from the " wind- 
grieved Apennine." In it is expressed especially the 
poet's vague, insubstantial being, like a cloud or a leaf 
at play with the wind — the intangible, Ariel-like Shel- 



396 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ley, unknown to the other self throbbing with sympathy 
for mankind. If there is something inspiring about the 
warm affection and high ideals of the human Shelley 
of Hampstead Heath, there is at the same time some- 
thing perhaps greater, certainly rarer, about the fancy- 
flights of the child of nature — a purer, freer spiritu- 
ality than can be met in any other poet. To the West 
Wind he says : — 

" Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : 
What if my leaves are falling like its own ! 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 
My spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! " 

At Pisa Shelley was happy among friends. His 
schoolfellow and cousin, Thomas Medwin, joined him ; 
and Captain and Mrs. Edward Williams, — Mrs. Wil- 
liams was the " Jane " of some of his later poems, — 
charmed by Medwin's tales of Shelley, came from Swit- 
zerland and soon took up their abode in the same house 
with him and Mary. Captain Edward Trelawny, the 
friend of the Williamses and faithful to the poet unto 
death, followed not long after. Of greater significance, 
Lord Byron quitted his Ravenna home for a palace 
in Pisa. Shelley, who was always a little silenced by 
Byron's fame and a wistful boyish admiration for his 
genius, saw clearly enough, however, to write to Hunt : 
" He has many generous and exalted qualities, but the 
canker of aristocracy wants to be cut out." The two 
great poets were nevertheless very close companions ; 
Shelley gradually overcame his shyness, and Byron said 
that his friend was the most truly noble spirit he had 
known. Shelley always charmed his listeners with his 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 397 

manner and his abundant conversation. His voice, very 
shrill, was eager and piercing rather than discordant. 

During Pisan days Shelley's genius continued to 
thrive. In the first year, 1820, he wrote the charming 
Letter to Maria Gisborne, the Witch of Atlas^ The 
Sensitive Plants and his fanciful version of (Edipus. 
The following year produced some of his best work : 
Epipsychidion, inspired by Emilia Viviani, a beautiful 
Italian girl cloistered against her will, a girl into whose 
clear spirit he read his intellectual, unattainable ideal 
of woman; Adonais, the surpassing elegy on John 
Keats, by far the most completely finished of SheUey's 
poems ; Hellas, an imaginative " improvise," he calls 
it, in celebration of Liberty ; and an essay, the Defence 
of Poetry, in which he showed his power of writing 
noble prose. During the first six months of 1822, the 
last of his life, he wrote three fragments : An Unfinished 
Drama ; Charles the First, a drama ; and The Triumph 
of Life, in terza rima, a poem which gives presage of a 
clearer, more tranquil maturity. Sprinkled through the 
three years are many fragmentary translations from 
Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and Grerman, and a host 
of shorter pieces such as The Cloud, The Skylark, 
Arethusa, Ode to Liberty, Hymn to Pan, and Ode to 
Naples, — poems full of his " lyrical cry." 

The last days were now at hand. In the summer of 
1822 the Shelleys and the Williamses took a small 
house, the Casa Magni, near Lerici, on the Gulf of 
Spezia. They procured a sailing skiff, which they dubbed 
Don Juan, and Shelley, ignorant of seamanship but 
enthusiastic over sailing, spent most of his time on the 
water with Williams, who knew something of naviga- 
tion. One day, early in July, they put forth, Williams 



398 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

at the helm and Shelley with his book, for Leghorn, 
where Leigh Hunt had just arrived. On the 8th, after 
happy days with Hunt, the two set sail again for Lerici 
— into the teeth of a storm. Through days of misery 
Mary and Jane watched and waited. Finally, on July 
19, the ill news was brought them by Trelawny ; the 
bodies had been washed ashore — Shelley with a manu- 
script of the Indian Serenade and two volumes in his 
pocket, Sophocles and Keats, the latter turned back as 
in the act of reading. The bodies were burned. Hunt, 
Byron, and Trelawny attending. Shelley's heart, how- 
ever, withstood the flames, and the intrepid Trelawny 
snatched it unconsumed from the pyre. The poet's ashes 
were then collected and buried at Rome, near the grave 
of Keats. The epitaph, composed by Leigh Hunt, had 
at first the two simple words. Cor Cordium, but Tre- 
lawny added those lines so indelibly characteristic of 
SheUey and his watery grave : — 

" Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 



JOHN KEATS 

Keats, whose name will ever be associated with 
beauty in English poetry, whose devotion to an ideal 
and remarkable realization thereof in a mere handful 
of years are unsurpassed in the history of English liter- 
ature, is especially inspiring as a man. Indeed, one of 
his friends, Archdeacon Bailey, writes of him as one 
" whose genius I did not, and do not, more fully admire 
than I entirely loved the man." And his friend Reynolds 
says, " He was the sincerest friend, the most lovable 
associate . . . ' that ever lived in this tide of times.' " 
Of extreme sensitiveness, endowed with a vivid imagi- 
nation, confronted by poverty, consumption, and a pas- 
sionate love which could never come to its fulfillment, 
Keats the man wins followers as readily as Keats the 
poet. 

The son of Thomas Keats and Frances Jennings, and 
the first of five children, he was born in London on the 
29th of October, 1795. His father, first an ostler in 
the livery stable of Mr. John Jennings of Moorfields, 
had married his employer's daughter and risen to a posi- 
tion of respectability in his trade, if not, as Lord Hough- 
ton would have it, to " the upper ranks of the middle 
class." It is sufficient, as Lowell points out, that Keats's 
" poetical pedigree is of the best, tracing through Spenser 
to Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery 
in the largest establishments in Moorfields." 

In his earliest youth Keats showed signs of a quick 
and fiery spirit, and, if the enthusiastic but often erro- 



400 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

neous Haydon is to be believed, of a tendency to make 
verses. Tlie boy had a trick, it was said, of answering 
questions by making a rhyme to the last word spoken. 
As a young child, when his mother was very ill, he stood 
guard at her door with an old sword, and allowed no 
one to disturb her. At her death, report says, he was 
so overcome that he hid for days under the master's desk 
at school. 

John, with his younger brothers George and Tom, 
was sent to the school kept by the Rev. John Clarke at 
Enfield. Perhaps the most remarkable features of his 
school-days were his pugnacity and his enduring friend- 
ships. He was a little boy and his brother George, of 
larger limb, often had to take his part ; but he possessed, 
says one of his schoolfellows, " a terrier-like resolute- 
ness." Again, " he would fight any one — morning, 
noon, and night, his brother among the rest. . . . No 
one was more popular." Indeed, a schoolmate thought 
afterwards that Keats as a boy had promised greatness, 
though rather a military than a poetic. Yet " he was 
not merely the favorite of all, like a pet prize-fighter, 
for his terrier courage," writes Charles Cowden Clarke, 
the son of the head master and one of Keats's warmest 
friends ; " but his high-mindedness, his utter uncon- 
sciousness of a mean motive, his placability, his gen- 
erosity, wrought so general a feeling in his behalf that 
I never heard a word of disapproval from any one, supe- 
rior or equal, who had known him." 

At school Keats had the reputation of being a " regu- 
lar " student, but he received no great education — small 
Latin and no Greek. Yet so keen was his perception 
and so great his power of making what he saw and 
heard his own that he came forth, as did the grammar- 



JOHN KEATS 401 

schooled boy of Stratford, with a far vaster equipment 
than many a university man. Soon, under the influence 
of the somewhat older Clarke, he acquired a love of the 
English poets — especially of Spenser, whose romance, 
says Clarke, " he ramped through like a young horse 
turned into a spring meadow." 

It is a little surprising, perhaps, to find this young 
enthusiastic lover of Chaucer and Spenser leaving Mr. 
Clarke's in 1810 and apprenticing himself to Mr. Ham- 
mond, a surgeon of Edmonton. But the orphaned son 
of a liveryman must be about learning a trade. He 
seems later to have quarreled with Mr. Hammond, who 
allowed the indentures to be canceled ; and Keats, at 
about nineteen, went up to London to study at St. 
Thomas's and Guy's hospitals. He passed with credit, 
July, 1815, his examination at Apothecaries' Hall. 
But his imagination was too keen for the work. "The 
other day, during the lecture," he once said to Cowden 
Clarke, " there came a sunbeam into the room, and 
with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray ; 
and I was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land." 
At the same time the purpose of consecrating his life 
to poetry was growing upon him. His verses had been 
praised in a circle of friends ; above all, Leigh Hunt, 
editor, poet, enthusiastic supporter of Liberty and 
friend of literary aspirants, and Clarke, whose reading 
of Chapman's Homer with Keats one night in 1816 
had called forth the famous sonnet — 

" Much have I travelled in the realms of gold " — 

urged him to the new profession. In 1817 he published 
his first volume of verse, with a dedication to Leigh 
Hunt in an effusive sonnet. 



402 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

For the few remaining years of Keats's life London 
and Hampstead were his chief places of residence. In 
fact, though he changed his home several times, his en- 
vironment, except for short trips to Stratford, Oxford, 
Scotland, Winchester, and the Isle of Wight, and the 
fatal journey to Rome, was substantially that of London 
and its neighborhood. 

Keats had many friends during these last years, 
and all of them held him in high esteem. Leigh Hunt 
had for a year or two the greatest share of his affec- 
tion ; together they wrote verses and discussed poetry, 
art, religion — all things — with great fervor. It is to 
Keats's credit that he was later less dazzled by Hunt's 
superficial splendor. Through Hunt, Keats met Shel- 
ley, already famous for his poetry and Godwinism ; 
Hay don, the vigorous, whole-souled, egotistical painter ; 
John Hamilton Reynolds, a writer of little note, but 
one of the finest natures that ever lived ; and James 
Rice, "of infinite jest " and lovable personality. Others 
whom he met intimately in various ways were an artist, 
Joseph Severil, later his constant companion in Rome ; 
Charles Wentworth Dilke, for many years editor of the 
Athenmum ; Charles Armitage Brown, one of Keats's 
closest friends, with whom he lived for some time at 
Hampstead ; and a young clergyman named Benjamin 
Bailey, later Archdeacon of Colombo. Three greater 
men, with whom Keats was not so intimate as with 
those already named, must nevertheless be added to the 
list of his friends: Wordsworth, Lamb, and Hazlitt. 
The meeting with Coleridge in Caen Wood is remark- 
able for Coleridge's prediction after Keats had passed 
on ; to a friend he said, " There is death in that hand." 
The common testimony of Keats's friends to his good 



JOHN KEATS 403 

temper, graceful wit, rare humor, and generosity is 
worth remembering. Especially famous was Haydon's 
" immortal dinner " on the 28th of December, 1817, 
where Keats first met Wordsworth. "Wordsworth's 
fine intonation as he quoted Milton and Virgil, Keats's 
eager inspired look. Lamb's quaint sparkle of lambent 
humor, so speeded the stream of conversation," says 
Haydon, " that I never passed a more delightful time." 
Keats now gave himself up entirely to poetry. So 
vivid were his sensations that he threw himseK into his 
work as he had thrown himself into his schoolboy pug- 
nacity. Poetry became an absorbing passion with him ; 
the slightest emotion he felt to the finger-tips. In 
writing to Reynolds from the Isle of Wight, whither 
he had gone to work on Endymion, he says : " I find I 
cannot exist without Poetry — without eternal Poetry 
— half the day wiU not do — the whole of it — I began 
with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan. I had 
become all in a Tremble from not having written any- 
thing of late — the Sonnet ^ over-leaf did me good. I 
slept the better last night for it — this Morning, how- 
ever, I am nearly as bad again." As Lowell puts it 
excellently, " Every one of Keats's poems was a sacri- 
fice of vitality ; a virtue went away from him into every 
one of them." The exquisite sensitiveness of Keats, liv- 
ing thus intensely on his art, came to be almost a dis- 
ease ; he was worn out by his constant nervous energy. 
"O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" 
he once cried. The minutest sensations excited such 
bewildering intellectual activity that the overloaded 
imagination longed for rest. Along with his extreme 

^ Refers to the sea sonnet beginning " It keeps eternal whisperings 
around." The sonnet was inclosed in the letter to Reynolds. 



404 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

sensitiveness, there developed in Keats a tendency to 
melancholia ; " a horrid morbidity of Temperament," 
he calls it. "It is," he continues, "the greatest Enemy 
and stumbling-block I have to fear." 

In 1818 Keats's first considerable production, Endy- 
mion, came out. In the preface the author apologizes 
for his " inexperience, immaturity, and every error de- 
noting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accom- 
plished." Again, with remarkably clear insight, " The 
imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagi- 
nation of a man is healthy ; but there is a space of life 
between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the charac- 
ter undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition 
thick-sighted : thence proceeds mawkishness." Clearly 
Keats was in this " space of life between " when he 
wrote Endymion^ but just as clearly he quite perceived 
and understood his "mawkishness," of which the com- 
prehension is half the cure. The poem received over- 
whelming censure from the reviews, especially from the 
Quarterly. Keats became, in their hands, a cockney 
poet, " the puling satellite of the arch-offender and King 
of Cockaigne, Hunt ; " he was advised to return to his 
" plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." 

Yet the idea that Keats suffered intensely from these 
attacks, that he was a weakling " snuffed out " by the 
reviewers, — an idea born chiefly of Shelley's Adonais 
and Byron's doggerel, " Who killed John Keats ? I said 
the Quarterly," — is largely false. We have already 
seen his calm, clear self-analysis in the Preface. " I hate 
a mawkish popularity," he wrote to a friend ; and after 
the reception of Endymion, instead of retorting, as did 
Hunt, or bringing suit, as did llazlitt, he quietly set 
about perfecting himself. " This is a mere matter of the 



JOHN KEATS 405 

moment," he says ; " I think I shall be among the Eng- 
lish poets after my death." A man so nervously sensitive 
must have winced, to be sure, under the bludgeon blows 
of his adversaries. " He suffered," as Lowell points out, 
" in proportion as his ideal was high and he was con- 
scious of falling below it." Yet it was his own unerring 
self -censure that cut far deeper than outside comment. 
It is essential, if Keats's character is to be interpreted 
aright, to understand that the effect of the attack was 
only temporary. Sensibility, it must be remembered, is 
very different from sentimentality. Keats was, his 
brother George tells us, " as much like the Holy Ghost 
as Johnny Keats," and Matthew Arnold, taking up the 
phrase, says : " The thing to be seized is, that Keats 
had flint and iron in him, that he had character." 
Indeed, it is the man's robustness, more especially in 
spite of his high nervous tension, which should excite 
remark. 

With so active a spirit, with a brain already " troubled 
with thick-coming fancies," — an intellectual sickness 
which friendships and an abundant fund of humor could 
not overcome, — Keats fell the prey to two things which 
far more than the reviewers drove him to an untimely 
death: a love affair, which took complete control of 
him, spiritually and physically ; and a hereditary disease, 
consumption, which mocked his passionate love and his 
efforts to write. At the same time poverty, due to a 
Mr. Abbey's mismanagement of his mother's not un- 
comfortable legacy, became a very real issue. 

Fanny Brawne, who lived near Brown's house in 
Hampstead, where Keats was living in the winter of 
1818-19, was the object of Keats's affection. What 
was at first only "a chat and a tiff" passed rapidly 



406 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

into violent passion and " a restless physical jealousy," 
as Mr. Colvin calls it. By April, 1819, he was probably 
engaged to her, yet Keats's poor health and poverty 
made immediate marriage inadvisable ; and as it was 
put off and he saw disease slowly tightening its grip 
upon him, the passionate lover was almost consumed 
with despair. 

It is from now on that his love letters to Fanny 
Brawne date, and the overstrained passion that breaks 
out in them, what Matthew Arnold calls "the abandon- 
ment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sen- 
suous man," has been caught at by many as a measure 
of his real character. But this view, naturally supported 
by the Adonais idea, is almost wholly unfair. In the 
first place, his letters to his friends show to the last his 
good humor, courage, and nobleness. In the second 
place, only parts of his letters to Fanny Brawne, which, 
by the way, were written to her, not to the public, 
exhibit " the merely sensuous man." 

Let us look at one of the most " abandoned " letters. 
" You have absorb'd me. ... I could die for you. My 
Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have 
ravished me by a Power I cannot, resist ; and yet I 
could resist till I saw you ; and even since I have seen 
you I have endeavoured often ' to reason against the 
reasons of my Love.' I can do that no more — tho 
pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot 
breathe without you " (October 13, 1819). This letter, 
to be sure, was written nearly four months before his 
first violent attack of consumption. But he had been 
ill long before this. He had suffered from sore throat 
during the whole preceding winter and spring ; yet it 
was not a physical sickness which racked him most. 



JOHN KEATS 407 

Consider the situation : A man sensitive to the utmost 
degree, confronted by a poetic ideal the very service 
of which took a " virtue " out of him ; a man whose 
brother had just died of consumption ; a man himself 
already in weak health — nothing, in short, but nerves 
and imagination left. The complete and overwhelm- 
ing irony of his fate, and, as if by an impossibly deeper 
irony, the nervous temperament with which he must wage 
his battle against such odds, wholly explain, if not ex- 
cuse, his occasional loss of self-control. His energy has 
already been consumed by his passion for poetry. And 
now he falls in love with a woman, not playfully, nor 
just " deeply," but with all his nervous imagination. Is 
it not natural enough that he should write " I cannot 
breathe without you " ? Then the foreseen tuberculosis 
and poverty and the utter loss of all cherished hopes — 
except poetic immortality — take hold of him : the wreck 
is complete. Yet — and this is the point for remark — 
he writes in March, 1820 {after the first serious illness) 
with a delightful touch of humor : " There is a great 
difference between going off in warm blood like Romeo 
and making one's exit like a frog in a frost." On the 
whole, he bore up with admirable courage. 

To return to the course of events which introduce the 
last chapter of his life. In the summer of 1818, Keats, 
after seeing his brother George, with a newly married 
wife, off for America, made a walking tour, with his 
friend Brown, through the English Lake District and 
Scotland. A letter to Reynolds gives an amusing ac- 
count of his visit to the cottage of Burns. Here he met 
" a mahogany-faced old Jackass who knew Burns. . . . 
His gab hindered my sublimity : the flat dog made me 
write a flat sonnet." During his tour Keats underwent 



408 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

great physical strain. In the Isle of Mull he caught 
a violent cold, from the effects of which he never quite 
recovered. It was the following winter, when he was 
making the acquaintance of Fanny Brawne, that he 
suffered continually from sore throat. In December, 
when consumption had carried off his brother Tom, 
he was induced to move to Brown's home, Wentworth 
Place, Hampstead. After a year of recurring colds he 
met his fatal illness on February 3, 1820. On seeing 
a drop of blood from his mouth, he said quietly to 
Brown: " It is arterial blood — I cannot be deceived 
in that color. ... I must die." 

It is interesting to note that Keats's best poems were 
written in the year preceding his serious illness. He had 
served his apprenticeship in Endymion ; the volume of 
1820, containing Lamia^ Isabella, the famous Odes, 
the Eve of St. Agnes, and Hyperion are of his ma- 
turity. In two years, with the coming sickness immi- 
nent upon him, he completely answered and silenced 
the reviewers, not by vituperation or satire, but by gen- 
uine work which bore its own fruit. No comments of 
contemporaries offer such abundant testimony as does 
this 1820 edition of poems to the real vigor of his char- 
acter and the nobleness of his ideals. He served poetry 
truly — not for a "mawkish popularity." What he 
might have done had he lived to even greater maturity 
must ever be sad conjecture. 

Much of the best work on the poems was done at 
Winchester, where Keats, having willfully absented him- 
self from Hampstead and Fanny Brawne, spent the fall 
of 1819. After his return to London he did little work 
except for an attempt at recasting the fragment Hype- 
rion. Soon the disease was upon him. During the spring 



JOHN KEATS 409 

and summer it grew intermittently worse ; he was told 
another winter in England would kill him ; and he finally 
consented to go to Italy — though he said it was " like 
marching up to a battery." A brave and generous com- 
panion was found in Joseph Severn, his artist friend, 
who sailed with him on September 18, 1820. On the 
boat was written his last poem, the famous sonnet be- 
ginning, " Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou 
art." 

The two travelers arrived at Naples late in October 
and journeyed thence to Rome, where Keats soon grew 
too weak even to write letters. A note of November 1, 
written to Brown, is full of his torture. At home he 
had kept to himself the consuming fire of his passion ; 
now he breaks out in despair: "I can bear to die- — I 
cannot bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Every- 
thing I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes 
through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my 
traveling cap scalds my head. . . . Despair is forced 
upon me as a habit. . . . Oh, Brown, I have coals of 
fire in my breast." In his last letter (November 30) he 
speaks, with a flash of the old humor, of " leading a 
posthumous existence." Towards the end he would not , 
hear of recovery, but longed for the ease of death — in 
a manner reminiscent of his line, — 

" I have been half in love with easeful Death." 

Once he said, " I feel the flowers growing over me," 
and another time gave for his epitaph, — 

" Here lies one whose name was writ in water." 
On the 23d of February, 1821, he died. He was buried 
in the Protestant Cemetery, near the pyramid of Gains 
Sestius. 



410 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The sensitiveness of Keats should be especially re- 
membered, for it was not only stronger than that of any 
other great English poet, but it underlay all his actions ; 
it was responsible for his weakness and his strength. 
It gave rise to his youthful mawkishness and to his 
" horrid morbidity of temperament ; " but it gave rise, 
too, to many noble qualities which easily outweigh these 
defects, — to his eager affection, to his generosity, and 
chiefly to an ambition which soon sought a far higher 
service than popular applause. It is indeed worth noting 
that Keats overcame his youthful mawkishness more 
surely than men who had less cause for melancholy. 
This sensitiveness, it must not be forgotten, was respon- 
sible for his genuine devotion to an ideal — a devotion 
that produced the little but great poetry which has put 
him, as he humbly hoped, among the English poets after 
his death. "He is," says Matthew Arnold, — "heiswith 
Shakespeare." Many who have pitied the poor, inspired 
weakling of their imaginations, the Keats kiUed by the 
reviews, give up reluctantly the tragic story they have 
believed. Fortunately for English poetry, John Keats 
was not so mawkish as some of his admirers; he had 
" flint and iron " in him. There is, even then, surely 
enough tragedy to his life ; and rather than a pathetic 
weakness to mourn, there is something infinitely greater, 
— an enduring strength and nobleness to admire. 



THE VICTORIAN AGE 

The chief characteristic of the Victorian Age, which, 
roughly speaking, may be placed between 1830 and 
1900, was variety of interest. No other time except 
the Elizabethan has been so full of enterprise. But 
the England of Victoria, though it possessed the vigor 
and resourcefulness, lacked the freshness and imagi- 
nation of the England of Elizabeth; hence, instead of 
being an age of discovery and poetry, it was rather 
one of invention and prose. If " More beyond " was 
the motto of the aspiring Elizabethans, " More within " 
may be said to have been the motto of the inquiring 
Victorians. 

The original impulse to this age of great develop- 
ment came, of course, from the French Revolution, 
which broke down the barriers of superstition and 
absolute monarchy, and demanded new political, reli- 
gious, and social organization. At first, however, the 
influence in England was seen only in the visionary 
poetry of the Romanticists. The first practical expres- 
sion of the new spirit was the Reform Bill in 1832, 
which secured for England representative government. 
From then on interest in political advancement was 
widespread, the more so since England, in her colo- 
nies, became a world-empire. A little after the first 
political ferment came the religious conflict, brought 
on largely by the scientific study of evolution. Science 
destroyed the old systems, threw many people into con- 
fusion and agnostic despair, and finally forced on the 



412 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

world a new and larger, less dogmatic faith. The third 
most striking change, the social, appeared in a great im- 
provement in the material comfort of the people. More 
and better schools grew up ; cities became cleaner, bet- 
ter lighted ; steam and electricity promoted intercourse 
of men and nations. This development, like the reli- 
gious, may be almost wholly attributed to science. Urged 
on by its inquiring spirit, culture spread amazingly; 
four of the six English universities were established in 
the nineteenth century ; study was for the first time 
put on an accurate, " historical " basis ; the cheapness 
of paper now put books, magazines, and newspapers 
within the reach of all ; and the " general reader " 
sprang into being. Yet, at the same time, the commer- 
cialism which the new mechanical interests inspired 
grew out of all proportion. The prosperity of the peo- 
ple was also its curse, for it brought about a narrow 
eagerness for mere luxury and a consequent lowness 
of artistic and moral ideals ; it came perilously near 
makinff man into a machine. Of this the best evidence 
is the atrocious architecture of the years from 1850 
to 1875 and the absorption of the majority of men in 
mere money-making business. If Macaulay reflects the 
progress and success of his times, Carlyle and Ruskin, 
it must not be forgotten, are strong in disgust at the 
way such success was attained ; their cry is for spir- 
itual as well as material progress. 

This age of diversity and scientific inquiry had two 
chief literary expressions — both in prose : (1) The 
novels which reached its maturity in Victorian days, an- 
alyzed and expressed far more than any other kind of 
writing the complexity of a very various life. Equally 
significant has been the perfecting of the short story, 



THE VICTORIAN AGE 413 

a form of fiction peculiarly adapted to the hurried, 
complicated life of the nineteenth century. (2) The 
essay, which through magazines reached a wide reading 
public, gave a medium to most of the great writers on 
scientific, religious, moral, social, and historical subjects. 
The poetry of the Victorian Age was generally sur- 
passed, especially in bulk, by the prose. In two in- 
stances, however, those of Tennyson and Browning, it 
clearly held its own. This period, though not so essen- 
tially a poetic age as the preceding one of Romanti- 
cism, offered much, especially in the realm of spiritual 
conflict, for poetic expression. There was, too, a vast- 
ness of enterprise, a universality of interest which 
called for great poetry. Yet, with the exception of a 
few master-hands, most of the work was self-conscious, 
imitative, or unimaginative. 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 

Every one has heard of Macaulay's wonderful mem- 
ory and clear style in writing ; but after these have 
been noticed, the man is too often dismissed as com- 
monplace. It is asserted by some that Macaulay, the 
prejudiced Whig and complacent materialist, lived in 
unaspiring prosperity ; that, except in a few freaks of 
memory and a mastery of a second-rate kind of writing, 
he presents a very dull figure when compared to other 
great literary men — to Coleridge, for instance, with his 
fascinating dreams and brilliant philosophy, even to 
Goldsmith, with his picturesque squalor. Coleridge's 
life, to be sure, is startling, one of the most interesting 
in history, and Goldsmith's is incomparable in its kind. 
If not to live sensationally, moreover, is to be uninter- 
esting, Macaulay is for the most part uninteresting ; he 
does not compete with Shelley and Byron. Yet lack of 
interest in general is an absurd charge to bring against 
Macaulay, however he may suffer by comparison with 
Coleridge, Goldsmith, SheUey, and Byron ; those who 
have accepted this error on faith should hasten to read 
Trevelyan's Life of his uncle. 

It must nevertheless be admitted, when the best has 
been said for Macaulay, that he is without spiritual in- 
terest — a conspicuous lack in a great man. " He appears 
to have been almost wholly wanting," says Mr. Morri- 
son, " in intellectual curiosity of any kind. ... It would 
not be easy to quote a sentence from either his published 
works or his private letters which shows insight or medi- 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 415 

tation on love, or marriage, or friendship, or the educa- 
tion of children, or religious faith or doubt." He had, 
that is, no dreams of " that un traveled world ; " he 
never guessed nor cared to guess what lay " beyond the 
sunset." He was wholly a man of this world, of the 
average man's kind, albeit of great magnitude ; and 
one feels that, although he is so far unparalleled, such 
another might conceivably appear. Hence the world 
does not treat his death as the irreparable loss that 
it sees in the death of a great genius. Wordsworth 
wrote of Coleridge : " Never saw I his likeness, nor 
probably the world can see again ; " for Coleridge was 
truly unique, an inimitable man. One may be indeed 
interested in Macaulay, even impressed by his greatness, 
but one is never awestruck. 

For all this, almost any one who starts to glance 
through Macaulay's letters finishes by reading them 
carefully and comes to feel that he has been in touch 
with a very interesting and great personality. And those 
who in reading have discovered the man's calm courage 
against financial and political odds, his labors for reform, 
and the stainlessness of his character, find his life not 
only interesting, but in a manner inspiring. Nor was it 
altogether without sensation. The sudden and wide pop- 
ularity of his writings ; his brilliant eloquence when as 
a young man he held the House of Commons under his 
spell so that old men remembered nothing like it since 
Fox and Canning ; his whole part in the great revolu- 
tionary movement of 1832, when the system of "Rotten 
Boroughs " was done away with, — all give evidence of 
something akin to sensation. In his own day, moreover, 
though his literary fame was great, he was especially 
notable as a talker, as the elegant orator in the House 



416 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

of Commons and as the man who charmed the gather- 
ings at Holland House. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay was the son of Zaehary 
Macaulay, of Scotch Presbyterian descent, and Selina 
Mills, the daughter of a Bristol Quaker. The father, 
who was for a time the governor of Sierra Leone, and 
who became in 1800 secretary to the company which 
had founded that colony, gave his whole life to the 
abolition of slavery. He was a stern man, with little 
understanding of the brilliancy and humor of his son, 
a man with more interest in a good tract than in a witty 
gathering at dinner, with most interest, however, in un- 
tiring good works. Macaulay's mother, more brilliant 
and sensitive than her quiet, religious husband, under- 
stood her son much better. On October 25, 1800, while 
she was on a visit at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, 
the home of her sister-in-law, who had married a Mr. 
Thomas Babington, the boy who took his uncle's name 
was born. He was the first of a family of nine chil- 
dren. 

For nearly his whole life Macaulay's home was Lon- 
don ; indeed, he never took any great interest in the 
country or even in any other city. London he knew by 
heart. While he was still very young his parents took 
a house in Birchin Lane. Soon after, they moved to 
the High Street, Clapham, on the south side of the 
Thames. 

Macaulay's boyhood sayings and doings are as well 
known as anything about him ; and they deserve, in 
fact, considerable mention, for in them appear without 
the complications of maturity his animation, his pre- 
cosity, and his faithful work. Trevelyan tells how the 
boy lay by the hour in front of the fire, with a book 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 417 

before him and a piece of bread-and-butter in his hand. 
He did not care for toys, and talked, the maid said, 
" quite printed words." Another time, after a servant 
at Strawberry Hill had spilled some hot coffee on the 
boy's legs, when Lady Waldegrave later asked him how 
he was feeling, he replied solemnly, " Thank you, madam, 
the agony is abated." Once, when a servant at home 
had thrown away some oyster-shells which marked a 
spot sacred to him, Tom went to the drawing-room 
and, heedless of visitors there, pronounced seriously, 
" Cursed be Sally ; for it is written. Cursed is he that 
removeth his neighbor's landmark." 

Macaulay early began to write. Before he was eight 
he compiled a Compendium of Universal History, show- 
ing in it a startling amount of information, — even 
though Oliver Cromwell figures as " an unjnst and 
wicked man," — and three cantos of a romance. in verse, 
the Battle of Cheviot, in the manner of Scott. Soon 
after, the remarkable child composed a long blank verse 
poem called Fingal, a Poem in XII Boohs. But his 
greatest boy-work was the heroic poem, Olaus Magnus, 
King of Norway, from whom he sought to trace his 
own descent. 

But Macaulay was not a spoiled child. His mother 
always concealed her wonder before him. When very 
young he was sent to the private school of a Mr. Greaves 
in Clapham, and whenever he begged to stay at home 
after dinner, he always met the same weU-known reply, 
" No, Tom, if it rains cats and dogs, you shall go." Yet 
his interest in reading did not prevent his being a lad of 
good spirits and fun ; and when he returned from school 
he filled the household of children with mirth. Mrs. 
Hannah More, next to his mother, had the greatest 



418 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

influence over his boyhood ; he often visited her at 
Barley Wood, and through her suggestion and aid com- 
menced his library. 

In 1812 the boy was sent, much against his will, to 
Mr. Preston's school at Little Shelf ord, near Cam- 
bridge. Two years later Mr. Preston moved to Aspen- 
den Hall, Hertfordshire, and there Maeaulay prepared 
for college. He was wholly without skill in sports, but 
on account of his frank manner and brilliant conversa- 
tion he was not unpopular. In his studies, especially the 
classics, he excelled, though he stole what time he could 
for his incessant reading. How superior he was to the 
average boy of thirteen, both in thought and expression, 
most of all in the maturity of his sense of humor, is 
evident from such a letter as the following : — 

Shelford, April 11, 1814. 

My dear Mama, — The news is glorious indeed. 
Peace! peace with a Bourbon, with a descendant of 
Henri Quatre, with a prince who is bound to us by all 
the ties of gratitude! . . . 

I am sorry to hear that some nameless friend of papa's 
denounced my voice as remarkably loud. I have accord- 
ingly resolved to speak in a moderate key except on the 
undermentioned special occasions. Imprimis, when I 
am speaking at the same time with three others. 
Secondly, when I am praising the Christian Observer.^ 
Thirdly, when I am praising Mr. Preston or his sisters, 
I may be allowed to speak in my loudest voice, that 
they may hear me. 

I saw to-day that greatest of churchmen, that pillar 
of Orthodoxy, that true friend to the Liturgy, that 

^ Edited by Macaulay's father. 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 419 

mortal enemy to the Bible Society, Herbert Marsh, 
D. D., Professor of Divinity on Lady Margaret's foun- 
dation. I stood looking at him for about ten minutes, 
and shall always continue to maintain that he is a very 
ill-favored gentleman as far as outward appearance is 
concerned. I am going this week to spend a day or two 
at Dean Milner's, where I hope, nothing unforeseen 
preventing, to see you in about two months' time. 
Ever your affectionate son, 

T. B. Macaulay. 

At Trinity College, Cambridge, which Macaulay en- 
tered in October, 1818, he made a record in some ways 
more brilliant than that at school, though he failed of 
highest honors because of inability at mathematics. He 
won, however, a Trinity fellowship, which gave him 
X300 a year tiU 1831. During his college days, too, his 
powers of conversation brought him more fame than 
they ever could to a boy at school. His special strength 
was argument and epigrammatic reply, and his rooms 
soon became a centre of brilliant discussions, which he 
was ready to carry to any hour of the night. Among 
his friends at college were Derwent Coleridge and 
Henry Nelson Coleridge, respectively son and nephew 
of the great poet. His closest friend was the remark- 
able Charles Austin of Jesus College. Of these two 
young men and their conversation Trevelyan tells that 
they happened, while on a visit to Lord Lansdowne at 
Bowood, to get talking one morning at breakfast. 
" When the meal was finished they drew their chairs to 
either end of the chimmey-piece, and talked at each 
other across the hearth-rug as if they were in a first- 
floor room in the Old Court of Trinity. The whole com- 



420 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

pany, ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-out, formed 
a silent circle round the two Cantabs, and, with a short 
break for lunch, never stirred till the bell warned them 
that it was time to dress for dinner." 

After his coUege days Macaulay studied law and was 
called to the bar in 1826. He always took more interest 
in government than in law, however, and, latterly, more 
in the study of government than in politics. At first, 
when he was not traveling on the Northern Circuit, he 
lived with his parents in Great Ormond Street. In 1829 
he took chambers near by at 8, South Square, Gray's 
Inn. 

But Macaulay the essayist soon overshadowed Macau- 
lay the lawyer. He began to write publicly in 1823 
with contributions to KnigMs Magazine. In 1825 his 
Essay on Milton was published in the famous Edin- 
hurgh Review, and with it came widespread fame. 
Murray, Byron's publisher, said it would be worth the 
copyright of Childe Harold to have Macaulay on the 
staff of the Quarterly, the Tory rival of the Edinburgh 
Review. The essays, which have done so much to fix 
Macaulay's fame, continued to appear from time to time, 
usually in the Edinburgh Review. Some of them were 
written during his busiest days, when the only moments 
he could find for such work were between five in the 
morning and breakfast. Yet he managed, in spite of 
necessary haste, to maintain a remarkably consistent 
excellence ; once he gained the popular ear, he never 
lost it. To-day his best essays are known as well as 
novels. No man has doae so much to introduce the gen- 
eral reader to unknown fields of history, biography, and 
literature and to inspire an unexpected and fruitful in- 
terest. Among the essays contributed to the Edinburgh 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 421 

Review, the best known are: Milton (1825), Hallam's 
Constitutional History, Frederick the Great, Horace 
Walpole, William Pitt, Sir William Temple, Lord Clive, 
Von Ranke's History of the Popes, Leigh Hunt, Lord 
Holland, Warren Hastings, Addison (1843). For the 
JEncyclopmdia Britannica, 8th edition (1853-1859), 
he wrote : Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, 
and Pitt. It has been said that nearly all that many 
well-informed people know of history and literature has 
been picked up from Macaulay's essays. 

The successful writer, however, was by 1830 gaining 
greater prominence with his tongue than with his pen. 
Breakfasting together had become very popular among 
the great men of London, and in the days when con- 
versation was an art Macaulay easily won his way to 
a conspicuous position. If wits and great ladies were 
interested to meet the author of the brilliant articles 
in the Review, they were still more eager to know the 
remarkable talker. At Holland House, where he was a 
frequent guest, he became familiar with Rogers, Camp- 
bell, Tom Moore, and Sydney Smith. He was a friend 
of Sir James Mackintosh, and he knew the great French 
diplomatist, Talleyrand. Such notes as the following 
are common in the diaries of great men who knew him : 
"Breakfasted with Hallam, John Russell, Macaulay, 
Everett, Van de Weyer, Hamilton, Mahon. Never 
were such torrents of good talk as burst and sputtered 
over from Macaulay and Hallam" (Lord Carlisle's 
Journal, June 27, 1843). 

Yet Macaulay was far from attractive in appearance. 
He was described by the poet Praed as " a short, manly 
figure, marvelously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and 
one hand in his waistcoat pocket. Of regular beauty 



422 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

he had little to boast ; but in faces where there is an 
expression of great power, or of great good humor, or 
both, you do not regret its absence." " While convers- 
ing at table," says Trevelyan, "no one thought him 
otherwise than good-looking; but when he rose, he was 
seen to be short and stout in figTire." When Lady 
Lyndhurst met him in 1831, she said : "I thought you 
were dark and thin, but you are fair, and, really, Mr. 
Macaulay, you are fat." 

The only test of Macaulay's endurance through ad- 
versity came soon after he began to practice law. Politi- 
cal defeat in later life merely meant more time for his 
cherished studies ; his fame was secure. But in 1826, 
when he was not rich, when his literary fame was small, 
and when he had not yet entered politics, the recent 
failure of the firm of Babington and Macaulay, which 
threw the family expenses largely on him, put him to a 
genuine test. So strait were his circumstances that he 
was forced to sell even his Cambridge gold medal. 
Through the whole matter, however, he bore up with 
admirable good humor, and with his cheery ways kept 
up the spirits of the company in Great Ormond Street. 
It is his best praise that he treated his position not as 
a matter of grim, noble duty, but as a matter of course. 

Lady Trevelyan, Macaulay's sister, in a few words 
addressed to her children gives a large glimpse of the 
family life at this time, a life a little limited in means, 
perhaps, but certainly not lugubrious. " In the morning 
there was some pretense of work and study. In the 
afternoon your uncle always took my sister Margaret 
and myself a long walk. We traversed every part of 
the city, Isling-ton, Clerkenwell, and the parks, return- 
ing just in time for six o'clock dinner. What anec- 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 423 

dotes lie used to pour out about every street, and square, 
and court, and alley ! There are many places I never 
pass without the tender grace of a day that is dead 
coming back to me. Then, after dinner, he always walked 
up and down the drawing-room between us chatting till 
tea-time. Our noisy mirth, his wretched puns, so many 
a minute, so many an hour! Then we sung, none of us 
having any voices, and he, if possible, least of all ; but 
still the old nursery songs were set to music and chanted. 
My father, sitting at his own table, used to look up 
occasionally, and push back his spectacles, and, I dare 
say, wonder, in his heart, how we could so waste our 
time. After tea the book then in reading was produced. 
Your uncle very seldom read aloud himself of an even- 
ing, but walked about listening, and commenting, and 
drinking water." 

Macaulay's first political position was a seat in the 
House of Commons for Calne. He entered in February, 
1830, and made his first speech on the 5th of April of 
the same year, in favor of removing the Jewish disa- 
bilities. From the beginning he took a foremost position 
through his oratory. He wrote strongly in argument, 
but men who heard him speak said his written argu- 
ments were nothing to his eloquence in debate. " When- 
ever he rose to speak," says Gladstone, " it was a sum- 
mons like a trumpet-call to fill the benches." In the 
spring of 1831 he was found, of course, on the Whig 
side ardently supporting the Reform Bill. When the 
bill became an act on June 7, 1832, he was appointed 
one of the commissioners of the Board of Control. In 
January, 1833, under the new system of election, he 
was sent up as member for Leeds. The following year 
he accepted a seat in the Supreme Council of India, 



424 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and in February sailed with his sister Hannah for Cal- 
cutta. Out of his salary during the four years of Indian 
service he saved about £20,000 ; and from then on his 
family was comfortably off. Besides his regular work 
as legal adviser to the Council, he undertook the chair- 
manship of the Committee of Instruction, as well as the 
presidency of a commission appointed to draw up the 
Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure. 

Very few men have read so constantly or so much as 
Macaulay. Even in India, when his work was very ex- 
acting, he found time to read an almost fabulous 
amount. In 1835 he writes, of classics alone, " During 
the last thirteen months I have read ^schylus twice, 
Sophocles twice, Euripides once, Pindar twice, Cal- 
limachus, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus Calaber, Theo- 
critus twice, Herodotus, Thucydides, almost all of 
Xenophon's works, almost all Plato, Aristotle's Pol- 
itics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides dipping 
elsewhere in him ; the whole of Plutarch's Lives, about 
half of Lucian, two or three books of Athengeus, Plau- 
tus twice, Terence twice, Lucretius twice, Catullus, 
Tibullus, Propertius, Lucan, Statins, Silius Italicus, 
Livy, VeUeius Paterculus, Sallust, Caesar, and lastly 
Cicero." But his reading was not always of this nature. 
" There was a certain prolific author," says Lady Tre- 
velyan, " named Mrs. Meeke, whose romances he all 
but knew by heart." Indeed, Macaulay seems to have 
devoured without great discrimination whatever litera- 
ture he could lay his hands on. He never spent much 
time in reflection or revery — a possible indication of 
shallowness. Once, for instance, he was crossing the 
Irish Channel in order to verify certain points for his 
History, at a time when one would suppose he might 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 425 

have had much matter for reflection, yet his acquisitive 
intellect did not pause an instant ; the light being too 
poor to read, he amused his mind by reciting to him- 
self half of Paradise Lost. The quantity and rapidity 
of his reading, moreover, and the memory which re- 
tained half of Paradise Lost and most of Pilgrim's 
Progress^ when his lack of meditation and of selection 
are considered, are not, as Mr. Morrison well points 
out, so much a title to honor as a sign of unprece- 
dented consumption, as even a defect. Macaulay's Ben 
Jonson would have said doubtless : " Would he had 
meditated a thousand times ! " 

Macaulay on his return to England in 1838 spent 
some time in Italy, and there made observations for his 
Lays of Ancient Rome. About the only poetry he had 
written since Trinity days was the poem called The 
Armada, published in 1833 in Friendship's Offering .> 
a collection of indifferent verse by various hands. The 
Lays were finally published in 1842. They were very 
popular ; eighteen thousand copies sold in the first ten 
years, forty thousand in twenty years ; and to-day 
every one knows " Horatius at the Bridge." 

Soon after reaching England in 1839 Macaulay be- 
came member for Edinburgh. In the same year Lord 
Melbourne made him Secretary of War, an office which 
he held for two years. By this time, however, his inter- 
est in active political life was fast giving way to his 
eagerness to finish his great life-work. The History of 
England., which he first seriously thought of in 1838. 
He did hold office again, as Paymaster-General under 
Lord John Russell in 1846, and in 1852 he was re- 
elected for Edinburgh. Failing health, however, and 
the absorbing work on the History kept him almost 



426 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

wholly from Parliament. In 1857, two years before his 
death, he was made Baron Maeaulay of Rothley, and 
thus went down to history as Lord Maeaulay. Though 
he took his seat in the House of Lords, he never spoke 
there. He accepted, however, the Lord High Steward- 
ship of the Borough of Cambridge. 

The History of England in its original conception 
was intended to cover the period from the accession of 
James II to the death of George IV. Five volumes of 
this enormous work were written, but the author got 
no further than William HI. In July, 1852, he suf- 
fered an attack of heart disease, followed by asthma. 
With death thus apparently near he worked single- 
mindedly at the great undertaking. Frequently his 
journal in later years records, instead of dinners at 
Holland House with Talleyrand or breakfasts with 
Hallam and Lord John Russell, the simple statement : 
" My task," or " My task and a little more." The first 
two volumes of the work were published by Longmans 
in 1848, and two more in 1855 ; the fifth volume, after 
his death, in 1861. None of Macaulay's other works, 
though popular, compared in phenomenal sale to the 
History. In 1856, 26,500 copies sold in ten weeks, and 
in a generation upwards of 140,000 copies sold in the 
United Kingdom alone. 

After the attack in 1852, Macaulay's health failed 
rapidly. He lived from 1841 to 1856 at the Albany, 
just off Piccadilly, but for his last years he sought a 
quieter home, HoUy Lodge, in Kensington. There, on 
the 28th of December, 1859, he died. He was buried 
with great ceremony in the Poets' Corner, Westminster, 
at the foot of Addison's monument. 

In remembering Maeaulay it is necessary to discount 



THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 427 

a good many glib, superficial estimates that have be- 
come current. Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked : 
" 1 wish I were as cocksure of any one thing as Ma- 
caulay is of everything." There was, it is true, painfully 
little hesitation about Macaulay, but he was distinctly 
not a conceited man ; he had, moreover, a better right 
to be " cocksure " about most things than the average 
man ; his mere knowledge was not only extraordinarily 
great, but accurate ; he knew that his memory was well- 
nigh infallible. His lack of spiritual depth has already 
been noticed ; but it is a very hasty and false conclusion 
to infer that he was without great intellectual depth, 
or without a very striking genius. He is furthermore 
charged with deficiency of real humor. He was not, 
certainly, a great humorist, he was in no sense a Lamb 
or a Thackeray ; but one suspects that those who prefer 
the charge have not read his correspondence. The fairest 
view, after all, considers the almost unanimous opinion 
of his contemporaries ; such an estimate does not forget 
his spotless integrity, his capacity for painstaking work, 
his brilliant conversation, his controlling eloquence in 
the House of Commons, and, above all, his authorship 
of the Essays and The History of England. Greater 
even than his vogue as essayist and historian is his 
influence on the writing of English prose, especially in 
journalism. In spite of many literary reactions, nearly 
every journalist who wishes to impress the larger pub- 
lic takes refuge in the force and the clearness, the 
antithesis and the brevity invariably associated with the 
name of Macaulay. 



THOMAS CARLYLE 

" Man, son of Earth and of Heaven," says Carlyle, 
"lies there not in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit 
of active Method, a Force for work ! " " All true 
Work is Religion : and whatsoever Religion is not Work 
may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, 
Spinning Dervishes, or where it will ; with me it shall 
have no harbor." Here is the great message of Car- 
lyle, by far the most outstanding feature of his life — 
genuine, earnest worh. This gospel he preached in 
words of fire. Many no doubt have held such a philo- 
sophy, but no man in the nineteenth century has brought 
to this philosophy the genius of Carlyle ; hence of no 
modern man can it so justly be said that he spoke 
" with tongues." It has become a commonplace to call 
him the prophet of the century. 

Yet this is by no means the whole or commonly ac- 
cepted view of Carlyle. It is still customary to hear 
him spoken of as a dyspeptic cynic, a hard-hearted 
misanthrope, and, worse yet, a hypocrite who, preach- 
ing fine practices, was in his private life a bully and a 
tyrant. This view is the result of Fronde's treatment 
of his master. In the nine volumes, including Personal 
Reminiscences, Biography, and Letters of Carlyle, writ- 
ten or edited by Froude shortly after Carlyle's death, an 
unfair impression was given ; for Froude, feebly assert- 
ing that his master was white, painted him black. So 
great, moreover, was the volume of Froude's work, and 
so overwhelming the authority with which he spoke, 




THOMAS CARLYLE 

From the portrait by J. A. McNeill Whistler 



THOMAS CARLYLE 429 

that, in spite of careful and adequate corrections by such 
scholars as Professor Masson and Professor Norton, the 
popular prejudice has largely lived on ; and now, invet- 
erate after twenty years, it is in some minds almost an 
incurable disease. The only fair estimate, after all, is 
based on a consideration of the whole correspondence, 
in the authentic editions, of Carlyle, his wife, and his 
friends. 

Carlyle's cruelty and insincerity, after such a con- 
sideration, cannot stand. Even his cynicism, often bit- 
ter and towards the end violent, is not the most funda- 
mental thing about him. " I have called my task," he 
wrote to Miss Welsh in June, 1826, "an Egyptian 
bondage, but that was a splenetic word, and came not 
from the heart, but from the sore throat." Almost all 
through his life Carlyle suffered also from sleepless- 
ness and dyspepsia, a " rat gnawing at his stomach." 
" Some days," he wrote in 1823, " I suffer as much 
pain as would drive about three Lake poets down to 
Tartarus." But there was more than this. " His mis- 
ery," says Professor Masson aptly, " was the fretting of 
such a sword in such a scabbard, or in any scabbard." 
Carlyle and his wife used often to joke about " the 
raal mental awgony in my ain inside." By disposition, 
too, he was moody and melancholy ; and in moments of 
despair he was cynical enough. But the Yahoo-raillery 
of Swift was never his. " The former," says Mr. Au- 
gustine Birrell, " pelts you with mud, as did in old days 
gentlemen electors their parliamentary candidates ; the 
latter only occasionally splashes you, as does a public 
vehicle pursuing on a wet day its uproarious course." 
The doubt, moreover, which was at the bottom of the 
cynicism was emphatically not his chief quality. He 



430 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

was certainly most unlike the cocksure Macaulay ; he 
did doubt all through his life — doubted Christianity, 
things of this world and the world to come, doubted j 
himself. But though he speaks of himself as "solitary," f 
" eating my own heart," " bearing the fire of hell in an 
unguilty bosom," there were also, as Professor Masson 
points out, " moments of inexpressible beauty, like 
auroral gleams on a sky all dark." And Dr. Gordon, 
who knew him well, said that he was " the pleasantest 
and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent 
company." Nor must Carlyle's humor and his great, 
boisterous laugh at his own ferocity be forgotten ; 
" those who have not heard that laugh," says Mr. Al- 
lingham, " will never know what Carlyle's talk really i 
was." Whenever he was thrown back on ultimate 
things, moreover, " cornered," as it were, or whenever 
others looked to him for faith, he came out strongly. 
" Courage " was always his watchword to his suffering, 
doubting wife; self-confidence after a soul-searching 
struggle is the main point of Sartor Itesartus. " Thou, 
too, shalt return home in honor," he says in Past and 
Present, " to thy far-distant Home, in honor ; doubt it 
not — if in the battle thou keep thy shield ! " — this is 
the gospel he strove to preach. 

Thomas Carlyle, born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, 
December 4, 1795, came of Annandale peasant stock. 
His father, James Carlyle, was a rugged stone-mason, 
*' wholly a man of action," says his son, " with speech 
subservient thereto ; " . . . with language "full of meta- 
phor, though he knew not what metaphor was." The 
mother, Margaret Aitken, was a trusting, sympathetic 
soul, who learned to write in later years that she might 
correspond with her son. Not much is known of the 



I 



THOMAS CARLYLE 431 

boy's early years. He says that he cried a great deal. 
In Sartor Resartus, his most autobiographic work, is 
pictured a man much influenced in childhood by nature, 
especially by rugged mountain scenery. Carlyle learned 
reading and arithmetic at home, at five went to a very 
elementary village school, and at nine entered the An- 
nan Grammar School. There he was shy and put upon 
by the other boys, till finally he broke his promise to 
his parents not to hit back. In 1809 he walked to Edin- 
burgh, eighty miles, and entered the university, with the 
purpose, at his father's wish, of preparing for the Scot- 
tish Kirk. At Edinburgh he did well in Latin and 
mathematics, but despised philosophy as then taught, 
and never mastered Greek. 

Carlyle did not, however, enter the ministry. He 
went, instead, through an uncertain, unhappy period of 
teaching, studying, and hack-writing before he finally 
experienced, in 1821, what he called his " fire-baptism." 
First, in the summer of 1814 he taught mathematics in 
the Annan Academy, " a situation flatly contradictory 
to all ideals or wishes of mine." Two years later he re- 
ceived a position as master in a school at Kirkaldy, Fife. 
Here the master of a rival school, Edward Irving, " Tris- 
megistus Irving," received him warmly and first taught 
him, he says, " what the communion of man with man 
means." The two became firm friends, and Carlyle years 
afterwards wrote a striking record of Irving's briUiant, 
brief career. Through Irving he was weaned of his 
mathematical bent, and he transferred his interest to 
history, devouring Gibbon in leisure moments. Through 
Irving, too, he was persuaded to give up Kirkaldy soon 
after the marvelous friend had himself abandoned it for 
Edinburgh and the ministry. Carlyle went up to the 



432 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

capital, started to study mineralogy, which introduced 
him to German, if nothing else, translated French scien- 
tific papers, and so struggled along, an aimless, befogged 
student, but with some sort of light flickering dimly 
ahead in the fog. At last Brewster gave him some work 
for his Edinburgh Encyclopcedia, to which he contrib- 
uted sixteen articles. Thus he dragged on, " living in a 
continual indefinite pining fear." 

In 1821 the remarkable crisis came. It is recorded 
in Say^tor Hesartus, — Teufelsdrockh's years of doubt 
and groveling fear and unhappiness, and finally his en- 
counter with the " Everlasting No." The story is written 
hot out of Carlyle's own experience ; one has only to 
substitute him for Teufelsdrockh and Leith Walk for 
the Rue St. Thomas de I'Enfer. Bunyan, praying by the 
roadside or fighting the fiend in the night-watches, had 
staked all on the success of his struggle ; not less did 
the issue matter to Carlyle, who, if not religious, yet 
was full of what he called " religiosity." " All at once," 
says Teufelsdrockh, " there rose a Thought in me, and I 
asked myself : ' What art thou afraid of ? Wherefore, 
like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and 
go cowering and trembling ? Despicable biped ! what is 
the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee ? Death? 
Well, Death ; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all 
that the Devil and Man may, wiU, or can do against thee ! 
Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer whatsoever 
it be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, tram- 
ple Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee ? 
Let it come, then ; I will meet it and defy it ! ' And 
as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over 
my whole soul ; and I shook base Fear away from me 
forever." "The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 433 

thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine 
(the Devil's) ; ' to which my whole Me now made an- 
swer : ' / am not thine, but Free, and forever hate 
thee ! ' " " It is from this hour that I incline to date my 
Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism ; per- 
haps I directly thereupon began to be a Man." So Car- 
lyle did not take orders for the Kirk, but from this time 
on he strove diligently to prepare himself to preach his 
gospel of genuine work and hatred of iniquity and base- 
ness. Heretofore he had been rudderless ; now he had 
a helm and a port. True, it was fifteen years before he 
found his audience, but after 1821 he was possessed of 
a purpose, " directly thereupon began to be a Man." 

Next to this encounter with ApoUyon in Leith Walk, 
the thing which most influenced Carlyle was the love of 
Jane Baillie Welsh, the bright, accomplished daughter 
of a Haddington surgeon. Here again Edward Irving, 
who had led him up to Edinburgh and the momentous 
spiritual conflict, took him down to Haddington and 
introduced him to Miss Welsh. She had once been a 
pupil of Irving's and was six years younger than Car- 
lyle, who was now twenty-six. Many stories are told of 
her clever, capricious youth — how she crawled along 
outside the rail of the bridge over the Nith, a feat 
among boys ; how, when she had been forbidden the 
masculine pursuit of Latin, she learned to decYme penna, 
hid herself under the library table, and at the appro- 
priate moment emerged, reciting her penna, pennce, and 
begging that she might be a boy. As she grew older 
she became very beautiful, with black hair and slender, 
graceful figure. She was a brilliant, intellectual wo- 
man, and soon saw that Carlyle was head and shoulders 
above her other suitors, that he was, indeed, a genius ; 



434 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

and she never lost faith in him. After five years during 
which he worked on at Edinburgh, reading and trans- 
lating German, or (1822-24) acted as private tutor in 
the BuUer family, he struggled into sufficient means to 
keep a very frugal household. So October 17, 1826, he 
married and settled at Comley Bank, Edinburgh. 

The contest over Froude's perversions has waged hot- 
test in connection with Carlyle's treatment of his wife. 
Of specific charges more in appropriate places. It is 
sufficient here to say that, from the letters now accessi- 
ble, the Carlyles seem to have been very much in love, 
before and after their marriage. It is true, no doubt, 
that they often quarreled over little things, but it is 
equally true that behind his rugged exterior and her 
sharp tongue there was an infinity of tenderness and 
affection. It would be futile to quote one or two pas- 
sages to prove this; opponents could easily find de- 
tached sayings in contradiction, such as Mrs. Carlyle's 
to a friend: "My dear, whatever you do, never marry 
a man of genius." Those who are infected with the 
heresy or interested in the whole story should read the 
whole correspondence. The authentic letters of Carlyle 
and his wife are the most convincing proof of a very 
genuine and enduring love. 

More than half of the sharp sayings, moreover, 
have been misinterpreted. If the irrepressible humor 
and the delight of both in grim jests are taken quite 
seriously, the Carlyles were, it must be admitted, in 
perpetual quarrel. The weak health of both, the child- 
less household, the depressing melancholy, and the lone- 
liness that always hedges genius — for both were of 
startling, sensitive genius — must, of course, have pro- 
voked many tiffs between two natures intolerant of 



THOMAS CARLYLE 435 

obstacles and naturally impetuous. " Woe to the house 
where there is no chiding," wrote Mrs. Carlyle in her 
note-book ; and certainly she would have been the first 
to find things dull if she had been forbidden to " chide." 
Carlyle himself held that it was " not good to be ' at 
ease in Zion.'" Chiefly, both overflowed with humor, 
even about their poor " ain insides ; " they were, along 
with their complainings and melancholy, persons " of 
infinite jest." Indeed, when one finds nothing, except 
the genius, which might not occur in any remotely sim- 
ilar family, and then contemplates the vast volume of 
discussion thereabout, one is tempted to think that 
there has been " much speaking." 

To return to the course of events — Carlyle struggled 
slowly into literary recognition. His methods were just 
the opposite of the fluent Byron's, with his " fatal facil- 
ity," and success was won only after arduous toil. His 
first considerable effort was a translation of Goethe's 
Wilhelm Meister in 1824. He became now intensely 
interested in German thought, wrote the Life of Schiller 
(1825), translated specimens of German Romance 
(1827), and started a correspondence with the patri- 
archal Goethe. Until the great German's death in 1832 
the two exchanged letters and gifts. Goethe, indeed, 
was one of the first to recognize the Scotchman's worth. 
" Carlyle," he said to Eckermann in 1827, " is a moral 
force of great importance ; there is in him much for 
the future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce 
and effect." Jeffrey, the " wonderful little man," who 
had outgrown the prejudices of youth which made him 
so hostile to rising genius, was another who saw Car- 
lyle's possibilities. Several essays by Carlyle for the 
Edinburgh Review and the Foreign Review were the 



436 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

result. Much the most famous of these was that on 
Burns. 

But the young prophet, uncomfortable in Edinburgh, 
in the spring of 1828 moved his household gods to 
Craigenputtock, an old farm of the Welshes in a bar- 
ren country, sixteen miles from Dumfries and civiliza- 
tion. There, except for the winter of 1831-32, spent 
at 4, Ampton Street, London, he lived for the next six 
years, studying hard and writing some of his best work. 

The shade of Froude again rises, for the life at Craig- 
enputtock he pictures as a life to which no consider- 
ate husband would subject such a tender wife as Mrs. 
Carlyle. But she, it seems, was content. True, she dated 
her letters from " The Desert " and often reviled the 
place ; but, humor not extracted, there remains on the 
whole less sincere complaint at Craigenputtock than 
in London. It must be remembered that at this time 
the Carlyles were very poor, that the husband's voice 
was as yet not greatly heard in the land, and that 
the upward pull seemed, to two dyspeptic, melancholy 
persons, a long and dreary one. London would doubt- 
less have offered more diversion, but probably not the 
solitude necessary for the writing of Sartor Resartus. 
At all events, there was not the drudgery Froude 
imagines. Mrs. Carlyle did not have to milk the cows 
or bake bread, nor is there evidence that she did so 
except as an occasional amusement ; she took, it seems, 
great delight in her domestic ministrations ; and they 
had one servant instead of two at her particular wish. 
Again, read the correspondence : it takes an ingenious 
or a hasty man to discover that life went strikingly ill 
at Craigenputtock. 

Much the most important thing Carlyle did there was 



THOMAS CARLYLE 437 

the writing of Sartor JResartus, the record of his experi- 
ence ten years before. But it did not wholly free him, 
as Werther had freed Goethe, from inward conflicts ; 
for the obvious reason that Werther deals with an 
interest of sentimental youth, easily outgrown, while 
Sartor deals with an interest of spiritual manhood, in 
such men as Carlyle never outgrown. His self-question- 
ing and melancholy, more or less commensurate with 
his state of health, continued all through his life. There 
were " auroral gleams," as Masson said ; but they were 
on a " sky all dark " — often dark as thunder-clouds. 
" When I look at the wonderful Chaos within me," 
Carlyle wrote to Goethe in 1830, " f uU of natural Super- 
naturalism, and aU manner of Antediluvian fragments ; 
and how the Universe is daily growing more mysterious 
as well as more august, and the influences from with- 
out more heterogeneous and perplexing ; I see not well 
what is to come of it all, and only conjecture from 
the violence of the fermentation that something strange 
may come." 

With Sartor Hesartus, hailed by Mrs. Carlyle as a 
work of great genius, the author, in the fall of 1831, 
journeyed to London. But publishers feared its rough, 
grotesque style, and for two years none would take 
the book. At length Eraser, for whose magazine Carlyle 
had begun to write, notably his essay on Johnson, con- 
sented to bring out Sartor in his periodical. It began 
in December, 1833, and ran through several numbers. 
The work brought Carlyle some prominence, but chiefly 
as a literary curiosity ; few as yet recognized his great- 
ness. 

Carlyle soon realized, however, that life in London, 
be it never so noisy and expensive, was a necessity for 



438 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

a writer for periodicals ; so in June, 1834, he moved 
to 5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Here, to keep out the noises 
of the street, he had a double wall built to his study on 
the top-floor ; and his wife finally managed to buy off 
the neighbors' cocks, whose crowing banished all slum- 
ber. For a time the small family lived very frugally 
indeed — two candles being the allowance of light for 
the drawing-room. Carlyle's routine of the day was to 
work during a long morning (dinner at three o'clock), 
to answer letters and ride in the afternoon, and to read, 
usually with his wife, in the evening. As yet the stream 
of curious visitors was small. 

With the publication in 1837 of Ttie French Revo- 
lution^ when Carlyle was forty-two, came his first real 
fame. He had been known before as the champion of 
German literature ; now he was recognized as a great 
writer, and as a vivid and discerning, if not unpreju- 
diced, historian. One of the most striking stories about 
him is in connection with the burning of the first vol- 
ume of the manuscript of The French Revolution. He 
might complain enough over little matters, be " a roar- 
ing Thor when himself pricked by a pin," as Mrs. Car- 
lyle puts it ; but when the distracted Mill rushed in to 
tell of the fire, Carlyle, to whom writing meant exhaust- 
ing labor, talked calmly for two hours and then, when 
Mill had gone, turned to his wife with : " Well, MiU, 
poor fellow, is terribly cut up ; we must endeavor to 
hide from him how very serious the business is to us." 

At the suggestion of Miss Martineau, Carlyle now 
began (1837) to give a series of lectures on German 
literature. These were so successful, in spite of his ap- 
prehension, that they were soon followed by others, the 
most famous of which were those on Heroes and Hero- 



THOMAS CARLYLE 439 

Worship (1840). But he did not like to speak in pub- 
lic. " O Heaven ! " lie wrote to Emerson in 1839, " I 
cannot ' speak ' ; I can only gasp and writhe and stutter, 
a spectacle to gods and fashionables — being forced to 
it by want of money." 

Heroes and Hero- Worship, published as a book in 
1841, is here particularly important because it reveals 
his character and principles. " The history of what man 
has accomplished in this world," he says, "is at bottom 
the History of the Great Men who have worked here." 
To illustrate this point, he treats of the hero as divinity 
(Odin), as prophet (Mahomet), as poet (Dante and 
Shakespeare), as priest (Luther and Knox), as man of 
letters (Johnson, Burns, and Rousseau), and as king 
(Cromwell and Napoleon). The point is that the great 
man, the shaper of world-destinies, is the genuine, ori- 
ginal man, " not a second-hand, borrowing or begging 
man," — standing if need be, like Johnson, on his own 
feet " on frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on 
that." Such a man is the true " king " of men, a leader, 
in whatever form — divinity, prophet, poet, priest, man 
of letters, actual king — the age may demand ; and the 
reverence for such leadership is essential to aU people. 
Democracy, as Carlyle saw it about him, was to him an 
abomination, the first-cousin of anarchy. 

Carlyle's gospel, then, was against the tendency of 
the times. Such movements as the great reform of 1832 
were not progress, he thought — unless into darkness 
and " the mask of Gehenna forevermore." Like Ruskin, 
he fought the mechanical spirit of his age. " I do not 
want cheaper cotton, swifter railways," he cried ; " I 
want what Novalis calls ' God, Freedom, Immortality.' " 
*'Will the whole upholsterers and confectioners of mod- 



440 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ern Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack 
happy ! " As Mr. Nichol puts it, interpreting Carlyle, 
"The electric light can do nothing to dispel the dark- 
ness of the mind." This philosophy was all very well 
at first : there was Hebraic simplicity and strength in 
the voice crying at Craigenputtock ; there was a merited 
rebuke in Carlyle's rugged sincerity, in his inexorable 
demand for genuineness. In Chartism (1839) and Past 
and Present (1843) his preaching was still reasonable. 
As time went on and he repeated himself, however 
(especially in Latter-Day Pamphlets, Frederick the 
Great, and Shooting Niagara^, his voice became shriU 
and his curses violent. In condemning the age of steam 
as a bar to spiritual progress he was led into absurd, 
ruthless condemnation of most present things ; he even 
included such men as Darwin in his anathema. Then 
it was, in the sixties, that men got their idea of the 
gloomy, savage satirist. But even then there still endured 
a tenderness and trustfulness wholly lacking in the last 
days of Dean Swift. 

In the forties, however, when Carlyle was at his best, 
he was by no means the emaciated, gloomy figure of 
later years. Emerson, who visited him at Craigenput- 
tock, describes him as a man then " tall and gaunt, 
with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his ex- 
traordinary powers of conversation in easy command ; 
clinging to his northern accent with evident relish ; full 
of lively anecdote, and with streaming humor which 
floated everything he looked upon." He had a great 
shock of dark hair, no beard until middle life, and a 
" bilious-ruddy or ruddy-bilious " complexion, says Dr. 
Garnett, "according as Devil or Baker might be pre- 
vailing with him." In private he was a great talker, 



THOMAS CARLYLE 441 

explosive, humorous, animated ; he even surpassed his 
clever wife. 

Among great men Carlyle had many friends and ac- 
quaintances. Emerson began a correspondence with him 
in 1834 and continued it till 1872, during which long 
period hardly a year passed without several letters. Of 
the great men of London Coleridge was gone, but Car- 
lyle when he first came to London had known the old 
sage of Highgate, " a kind of Magus, girt in mystery 
and enigma." Irving, his old friend and Coleridge's 
disciple, was dead too. John Sterling, another disciple, 
who lived till 1 844, said dying to Carlyle : " Towards 
England no man has been and done like you." Words- 
worth he knew, but did not admire ; in Southey he 
found greater sympathy. Others whom he knew were 
Leigh Hunt, still lingering; Walter Savage Landor, 
the shaggy old lion ; Dickens, a young man, but ad- 
vanced in fame ; and Tennyson, rising to success. 
There is a story that he and Tennyson sat speechless, 
smoking for a whole evening by the fireside at Cheyne 
Row, and that when Tennyson got up to go Carlyle 
broke silence with, " We 've had a grand evening, Al- 
fred; coom again." Later he became familiar with 
Kingsley, Browning, and Ruskin. 

In Carlyle's fame Sartor Resartus and Heroes and 
Hero - Worship have taken perhaps the most prominent 
place, but the great bulk of his work was in history. 
The next long labor after The French Revolution was 
his edition of CromwelVs Letters and Speeches 
(1845). His third and greatest efPort was the History 
of Frederick II (1858-65). Between these two came 
Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), the Life of John 
Sterling (1851), and The Nigger Question (1853). 



442 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The labor on Frederick was tremendous and taxing. 
" My days were black and spiritually muddy," he says ; 
" hers, too, very weak and dreamy, though wwcomplain- 
ing ; never did complain once of her w?ichosen suffer- 
ings and miserable eclipse under the writing of that sad 
book." When it was finished he was past sixty and 
subsequently wrote very little, only Shooting Niagara : 
and After? (1867), an attack on Socialism; The 
Early Icings of Norway : also an Essay on the Por- 
traits of John Knox (1875) ; and parts of the Remi- 
niscences^ published in 1881 after his death. 

It was during the writing of Frederick that there 
occurred the difference, if it can be called such, between 
Carlyle and his wife. Froude, who gives the exaggerated 
impression, bases his views chiefly on the inaccurate 
evidence and unclean imaginations of one person, an 
intimate but not greatly respected friend of Mrs. Car- 
lyle's ; " a flimsy tatter of a creature," as Carlyle puts it. 
The only offense of Carlyle's which is worth discussing is 
his affection for Lady Ashburton, the brilliant mistress 
of Bath House. This affection, in the light of facts, 
turns out to be nothing more than the warm admiration 
which Carlyle had for a very clever woman and which 
Lord Ashburton was sensible enough to countenance. 
But the neglect of Mrs. Carlyle and her jealousy are 
Fronde's points. For some neglect Carlyle must stand 
guilty, but it was unconscious and far less than that 
caused by Frederick. For the jealousy Mrs. Carlyle, 
who particularly loved to excel in wit, and who saw her- 
self surpassed only in this one instance, is alone re- 
sponsible. Even then, both the neglect and the jealousy 
have been exaggerated. Mrs. Carlyle went frequently 
to Bath House when her health allowed and did not 



THOMAS CARLYLE 443 

seriously complain until slie was attacked in 1856 by a 
nervous disorder which was quite naturally accompa- 
nied, doctors have testified, by a morbid jealousy. In 
1857, when Lady Ashburton had died and Mrs. Car- 
lyle had recovered from her strange sickness, the latter 
accepted gifts of Lady Ashburton's things — certain 
evidence that in normal health she did not take the 
matter seriously. The morbid complaints, moreover, 
which she wrote in her Journal during her sickness, 
were not known by Carlyle till he read them after her 
death, and then not all of them ; so that his misunder- 
standing of her unhappiness, attributing it, as he did, 
to her ill health, was quite reasonable ; and his subse- 
quent grief over the pain he had caused her was to be 
expected. It is hard to believe, with Froude, that Car- 
lyle felt the necessity of expiating by confession to the 
world some horrible and so far undiscoverable wrong- 
he had done. 

The saddest chapter of his life, indeed, is that which 
deals with his wife's death in 1866 and the writing of 
the Reminiscences. He had been elected Lord Rector 
of Edinburgh University in 1865 ; the health of both 
husband and wife, though hopelessly shattered, was 
better than for some years ; the increased sale of his 
books had set him in easy circumstances ; he was .sur- 
rounded by friends who flocked to Cheyne Row to do 
him honor. Then the blow fell. While he was off at 
Edinburgh making a successful inaugural address, on 
the 21st of April, 1866, his wife, driving in Hyde Park, 
died suddenly of heart failure. For the rest of the 
year he could do little but read her letters mournfully 
and write of her — his "bright fellow-pilgrim," as he 
called her. "I say deliberately," he wrote in " Jane 



444 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Welsh Carlyle," included in the Reminiscences by 
Froude, who tore off Carlyle's solemn injunction that 
the chapter should never be published, " her part in 
the stern battle — and, except myself, none knows how 
stern — was brighter and braver than my own. Thanks, 
darling, for your shining words and acts, which were 
continual in my eyes, and in no other mortal's. Worth- 
less I was your divinity, wrapt in your perpetual love of 
me and pride in me, in defiance of all men and things." 

Carlyle survived his wife fifteen years, most of which 
were spent in thinking of her. He shrank from public 
honors. He did accept, in 1874, the Prussian Order, 
" Pour le Merite," but he declined, in an admirable 
letter, Disraeli's offer of the " Grand Cross of the 
Bath." It is this Carlyle — old, bent, with gray beard 
and hair, wearing a slouch hat, and riding towards dusk 
in Hyde Park — that is so vividly remembered by 
many still alive. His fierce, impatient spirit was much 
softened ; those who saw him near the end found him 
gentle, with only occasional flashes of indignation. Yet 
he was still very sad, waiting earnestly for death. In 
the next to last letter he wrote, February 8, 1879, he 
says to Dr. John Carlyle, his much-loved brother: 
" Alas ! Alas ! The final mercy of God, it in late years 
always appears to me, is that He delivers us from a life 
which has become a task too hard for us." On Febru- 
ary 5, 1881, he died. He was buried, according to his 
wish, among his people at Ecclefechan. 

Many, with Lowell, admitting the sincerity and use- 
fulness of Carlyle's early prophecy, and the excellence 
of his vivid style, think that he came, by violent repeti- 
tion of the same theories, to be unconsciously one of 
the shams he himself had abominated. That Carlyle 



THOMAS CARLYLE 445 

was, after all, in his less heaven-sent moments one of 
those poor human pedestrians he " splashed with mud 
in his uproarious course," that he was splendidly sin- 
cere and inspiriting and yet cynical, is the human 
tragedy of his life. Without this confusion of elements 
he would have been indeed either a bully or a saint — 
and incidentally Sartor Resartus would not have been 
written. " What can you say of Carlyle," said Ruskin, 
" but that he was born in the clouds and struck by 
lightning ? " 

A more favorable estimate is Mr. Augustine Birrell's : 
he calls Carlyle " one who, though a man of genius and 
of letters, neither outraged society nor stooped to it ; 
was neither a rebel nor a slave ; who in poverty scorned 
wealth ; who never mistook popularity for fame ; but 
from the first assumed, and throughout maintained, the 
proud attitude of one whose duty it was to teach and 
not to tickle mankind." 

The central principle of that teaching was war on 
sham and cant and idleness — a gospel well suited to 
cure the great sin of the Victorian Age, complacent, 
opulent materialism. Carlyle discovered, along with 
Goethe and Schiller, what, indeed, most of the noble 
souls of the nineteenth century did at last fall back on 
as the one important philosophy. 

" Industry that never wearies," 
says Schiller in Die Ideale^ 

" That slowly works, but ne'er destroys, 
That to the eternal structure layeth 
But grain of sand for grain of sand, 
Yet of time's debt as surely payeth 
Days, minutes, years, with cane'lling hand." 

And near the close of Goethe's Faust the angels sing : 



446 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

" Who always striving labors on, 
Him can we grant salvation." 

" Cry * Speed, — fight on ; fare ever there as here ! ' " 

is Browning's last word. " Look up," says Carlyle, 
" my wearied brother : see tby fellow-workmen there, in 
God's Eternity ; surviving there, they alone surviving : 
sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Bodyguard of 
the Empire of Mankind." Carlyle may have doubted 
in many little things and in some great things ; may, 
as far as a smiling face and a good digestion go, have 
been a pessimist ; was certainly a lonely and an unhappy 
man : but in the one great thing he was an earnest, an 
exuberant optimist. 



JOHN RUSKIN 

The most obvious thing about Ruskin is his sensi- 
bility. Other characteristics — his integrity, his sim- 
plicity, his attitude towards art, his fatherly affection 
for the English poor, his querulous indignation — are 
the most striking at certain times ; but underlying all 
these and animating his whole life is an extreme emo- 
tional sensitiveness. Of this there is abundant evidence. 
In early youth he was uncommonly affected by nature 
and art. Though discipline made him sober and serene, 
he always gave important things an emotional interpre- 
tation. Whenever he came in contact with women, 
moreover, he was ruled by the same sensibility, whether 
it was to revere them as a class, as in Queen^s Gardens^ 
or to fall in love with them individually, as he did many 
times. In old age one of the things he most liked was 
to be surrounded by innumerable, beautiful, ecstatic 
maidens, to whom he could teach, in half-fatherly way, 
his Ethics of the Dust. Still another evidence is his 
positive distress for the poor. " I simply cannot paint," 
he says in Fors Clavigera, " nor read, nor look at 
minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very 
light of the morning sky . . . has become hateful to 
me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs 
of where I know it not, which no imagination can in- 
terpret too bitterly." 

This sensibility, as in the case of two very different 
men. Burns and Keats, was Ruskin's weakness and 
strength. It caused him many a futile effort and 



448 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

many an hour of misery. Yet few natures have been 
better endowed for inspiring people througli beauti- 
ful language to an appreciation of the beautiful and 
the noble in life. For it must not be imagined that 
such sensibility precludes careful thought. Ruskin 
called himself " analytic " and " reasonable," even as a 
child ; in fact, his power of mere intellect was very 
great. His reasoning, however, was in spiritual things ; 
his intellect was governed by ideals rather than by 
material facts ; and he never was so blind as to depend 
on mere intellect in matters where only spiritual insight 
could perceive. " You cannot judge with judgment," 
he says, " if you have not the sun in your spirit and 
passion in your heart." He had the intellectual virility 
of a man, but he had the quick sensibility of a woman. 

As a consequence Ruskin stands, with Carlyle, as one 
of the great prophets of the Victorian Age. It is of 
small matter whether his views on art were sound or his 
social reforms practicable ; it is of great matter that he 
pointed the way, that he made unflinching war on the 
ugly, the mean, and the sordid. 

John Ruskin was born at 54, Hunter Street, Bruns- 
wick Square, London, on February 8, 1819. Of his 
plebeian ancestry he was very proud. He tells in Fors 
that his mother was a sailor's daughter, one of his 
aunts a baker's wife, the other a tanner's, and adds 
that he doesn't know much more about his family, 
except that there used to be a green-grocer of the name 
in a small shop near the Crystal Palace. His father, 
John James Ruskin, of Scotch descent, was a wine 
merchant, upon whose grave the son wrote, " He was 
an entirely honest merchant." Ruskin's mother, Mar- 
garet Cox, was also of Scotch descent. Her well-trained 



JOHN RUSKIN 449 

mind, strict discipline, and constant interest in the 
boy's welfare had much to do with shaping his habits 
and thoughts. It must not be imagined, however, that 
she was stern. She was in a sense very indulgent. So 
great was her care for her only son that she coddled 
him by her caution. Things which other boys did he 
was not allowed to do ; not even allowed to put up the 
step of the carriage — " lest I should pinch my fingers ; " 
nor permitted " to go to the edge of a pond, or be in 
the same field with a pony." 

At first Ruskin's schooling was chiefly in the Bible. 
"My mother forced me," he says in Prceterita^ his 
autobiography, " to learn long chapters of the Bible by 
heart ; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, 
hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, 
about once a year; and to that discipline — patient, 
accurate, and resolute — I owe, not only a knowledge 
of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but 
much of my general power of taking pains, and the best 
part of my taste in literature." As time went on, other 
studies were added, and the whole morning was con- 
sumed in work. In the afternoon the boy was allowed 
to walk with his nurse or to play in the garden at Heme 
Hill, whither the Ruskins had moved in 1823. But the 
Scotch parent, with her evangelical strictness, did not 
allow him a confusion of toys. " I had a bunch of keys 
to play with," he says, " as long as I was capable only 
of pleasure in what glittered and jingled ; as I grew 
older, I had a cart and a ball ; and when I was five or 
six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With 
these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient pos- 
sessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, 
did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I 



450 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

soon attained serene and secure methods of life and 
motion ; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing 
the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet." 

Nearly all of Ruskin's education was at home. He 
early read Scott, and Pope's Homer, from whom, he 
says, he learned his Toryism. He always had an artist's 
love for kings and castles — but only as decoration for 
the land ; for himself he desired a humble cottage. On 
Sundays his literary diet, besides the Bible, was Pil- 
grim^ s Progress and jRohinson Crusoe. As he grew 
older, he was allowed to sit quietly in his corner and 
listen to Mr. Ruskin read aloud. Thus he became 
familiar with Shakespeare, Christopher North's Nodes 
Ambrosiance, and, oddly enough in such a family, with 
Byron and Smollett. By himself he early developed an 
interest in geology, which he kept up throughout his life. 
When he was fifteen he was sent to the private school 
of the Rev. Thomas Dale, and a Mr. Rowbotham came 
in to teach him mathematics. Much the most educative 
influence, however, his mother with her Bible always ex- 
cepted, was exerted by his frequent travels. The sherry 
business took Mr. Ruskin all over England, and it 
was the custom for his wife and child to accompany 
him in a stately chaise. More important still was the 
influence of the Continent. 

In 1832 Mr. Telford, a partner of Mr. Ruskin's, 
gave the boy a copy of Rogers's Italy, illustrated by 
Turner, and thus " determined," says Ruskin, " the main 
tenor of my life." The following year the little family 
visited Germany, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. 
From now on, indeed, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes 
for the boy's health, which was never strong, the visits 
to Switzerland were frequent. Ruskin, writing in later 



JOHN RUSKIN 451 

life, counted the first sight of the Col de la Faucille, a 
pass in the Alps, as one of the chief determining in- 
fluences of his artist's life ; it " opened to me in dis- 
tinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true 
home in this world." Of the influence of foreign cities, 
he says : " There have been, in sum, three centres of 
my life's thought : Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa." 

Long before he saw the Alps, however, Ruskin be- 
gan to write and to draw, at first in a very imitative 
way. "The earliest dated efforts I can find,", he says, 
..." are six ' poems ' . . . ' finished about January, 
1827.' The whole of it, therefore, was written and 
printed in imitation of book-print, in my seventh year." 
His interest in drawing began a little later, but by 1831 
he showed sufficient promise to have a Mr. Runciman 
come in to give him lessons. 

Among his few playfellows Ruskin was shy and un- 
sophisticated. He seems to have preferred the com- 
panionship of girls. When he was only eight he became 
very fond of his little Scotch cousin, Jessie Richardson, 
and agreed with her that " we should be married when 
we were a little older." About four years later, he says, 
a Miss Andrews, " an extremely beautiful girl of seven- 
teen," sang " Tambourgi, Tambourgi," and " made me 
feel generally that there was something in girls that I 
did not understand and that was curiously agreeable." 
But these were only the beginnings of more serious 
sensibilities. 

When Ruskin entered Christ Church College, Ox- 
ford, in 1836, then, he was an extremely delicate, sen- 
sitive youth, well disciplined in self-control, already 
ardently attached to art and nature, shy, and hopelessly 
ignorant of men and their ways. His mother came up to 



452 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Oxford to live near him, his father visited him on Sun- 
day, and his fellow collegians at first looked on him as 
a kind of joke. Soon, however, he showed himself, in 
spite of his girlish ways, to be a man of such parts that 
he was sought out by the best intellects at Oxford. He 
ranked very well, studied hard, and won the Newdigate 
Prize for poetry. He was intended by his fond parents 
for the Church, but he early revolted from any such idea. 
His father's ideal, he says, was " that I should enter at 
college into the best society, take all the prizes every 
year, and a double first to finish with ; marry Lady 
Clara Vere de Vere ; write poetry as good as Byron's, 
only pious ; preach sermons as good as Bossuet's, only 
Protestant ; be made, at forty, Bishop of Winchester, 
and at fifty, Primate of England." 

At Oxford Kuskin came into some literary promi- 
nence. His first printed piece had been an Essay in 
1834 on the geological strata of Mont Blanc, in Lou- 
don's Magazine of Natural History. In 1835 Friend- 
ship's Offering, an annual, contained three of his poems. 
While he was at college he wrote, under the assumed 
name of " Kata Phusin" (i. e. According to Nature), 
several papers for Loudon's Architectural Magazine. 
Readers thought they were written by an Oxford don. 

In 1840, however, just before taking his degree, 
Ruskin was forced, by an attack of consumption, to 
leave for Italy. How much his ill health was the result 
of the news of the marriage of Clotilde Domecq is of 
course conjecture, but the relapse came directly after he 
heard it. At all events, the affair was very serious. M. 
Domecq, the French partner of Mr. Ruskin, came with 
his four daughters to visit at Heme Hill when John 
was seventeen. John was forthwith "reduced to a heap 



JOHN RUSKIN 453 

o£ white ashes." "In company I sat jealously miserable 
like a stock-fish. ... I endeavored to entertain my 
Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic-hearted mistress 
with my own views upon the subjects of the Spanish 
Armada, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Doctrine of 
Transubstantiation." By way of variety, the sentimen- 
tal youth wrote her verses and letters in bad French. 
But Clotilde, or Adele as he called her, to rhyme with 
" shell, spell, and kneU," laughed over them in " rip- 
pling ecstasies of derision." In short, she four years 
later married Baron Duquesne, and almost immediately 
Ruskin's health gave way. For two years he was an 
aimless invalid in Italy. 

The Italian life, however, bore its fruit ; for it led 
to the production of Euskin's first great work, Modern 
Painters. The first volume (1843), which was chiefly 
in praise of Turner, brought down the hostility of 
orthodox critics, especially of Blackwood' s. But many, 
poets in particular, welcomed the young champion of 
new theories. His proud father gave out the identity 
of the " Graduate of Oxford " who had written the 
book, and urged his son to continue the work. The 
result was frequent trips to the Continent, and by de- 
grees the rest of Modern Painters, vol. ii in 1846, 
vols, iii and iv in 1856, and vol. v in 1860. The 
Turner heresy, however, was somewhat amended, for 
in 1844 the wonders of the Venetian school, more es- 
pecially of Veronese and Tintoretto, for the first time 
dawned on Kuskin. 

With the publication of the first volume of Mod- 
ern Painters Ruskin, only twenty-four, took a lead- 
ing position among writers on art ; and some of the 
more discerning judges saw what now counts for much 



454 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

more than his critical opinions, — his mastery of de- 
scriptive English. Seven Lamps of Architecture was 
published in 1849, Pre-Raphaelitism in 1850, and 
Stones of Venice in 1851-53. Ruskin, indeed, became 
one of the apostles of the Pre-Raphaelites, who in- 
cluded such men as D. G. Rosetti, Burne-Jones, Mil- 
lais, Holm an Hunt, and William Morris. 

During all this art interest Ruskin's sensitiveness 
to feminine charm did not cease. In 1847 " a Scot- 
tish fairy, White Lady, and witch of the fatallest 
sort," — Charlotte Lockhart, granddaughter of Sir 
Walter Scott, — crossed his path and again reduced 
him to "a heap of ashes." But Charlotte Lockhart 
married Hope Scott, and Ruskin spent the summer 
of 1847 in despondency and religious depression. 

The next year, moreover, took place the most unfor- 
tunate event in his life, — an event which he skips 
wholly in Prceterita. His parents, determined that he 
should marry, finally persuaded him to offer himself to 
Euphemia Chalmers Gray, the daughter of old Perth- 
shire friends and a great beauty. As ill luck would 
have it, she accepted him. They were married April 
10, 1848, but never got along together. She adored 
Loudon and society; he abominated them. Some years 
later she brought suit for nullity of marriage, he quietly 
acquiesced, and she soon married the famous painter, 
John Everett Millais. Nor was this Ruskin's last un- 
fortunate affair ; indeed, but for the few last years 
of peace before the grave, the story of his life grows 
increasingly sad. 

The year 1860 is generally taken to mark the be- 
ginning of Ruskin's interest in social reform. Yet he 
had always, ever since he saw clearly outside the Cal- 



JOHN RUSKIN 455 

vinistic blinders put upon him in youth, been more or 
less zealous to uplift the poor and to denounce the vul- 
gar. In all his writings on art he had considered the 
usefulness of beauty, art in its moral aspects. Beauty, 
simplicity, sincerity, and their usefulness, — this was 
the basis of Ruskin's teaching. In early life the artis- 
tic side predominated ; in later life the ethical. 

In the thick of his crusade against the " philosophy 
of steam," however, he continued his work on art. In 
1869 he was elected Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, 
a position which he held for ten years and again for a 
year in 1883-84. His lectures were finally published 
in book form as: Lectures on AH (1870), Aratra Pen- 
telici (1870), Michael Angela and Tintoret (1870), 
Eagle's Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1872), 
Love's Meinie (1873), Val d'Arno (1873), Art of 
England (1873), and Pleasures of England (1884). 
He also wrote a sort of model guide-books : Mornings 
in Florence (1875-77), Academy of Fine Arts in 
Venice (1877), and St. Marie's Rest (1884). 

The books in which Ruskin figures as a teacher are 
among his best known. Unt6 This Last was published 
in 1862, Munera Pulveris in 1863, Ethics of the Dust 
in 1865, Sesame and Lilies in 1865, Crown of Wild 
Olive in 1866, auditors Clavigera in 1871-78. Even 
in such works as Mornings in Florence he is chiefly 
intent on showing the usefulness of art, the simple sin- 
cerity and hence excellence of such men as Giotto, 
and the comparative worthlessness of such mere "gold- 
smith's work " as Ghirlandajo's. 

The material philosophy of " Gradgrind," the apo- 
theosis of machinery and mammon, — this was what 
Ruskin attacked. Dickens had made fun of the same 



456 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

thing ; Carlyle had cursed it. In Unto This Last, 
published first in Thackeray's Cornhill Magazine^ 
Ruskin says : " There is no wealth but Life — Life, 
including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admira- 
tion. That country is the richest which nourishes the 
greatest number of noble and happy human beings ; " 
and again, in The Mystery of Life and its Arts, 
the third lecture of Sesame and Lilies, he speaks 
of " the reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, 
and the squalid misery of modern cities." " I shoiild 
like," he says in Fors, " to destroy most of the rail- 
roads in England, and all the railroads in Wales. I 
should like to destroy and rebuild the Houses of Par- 
liament, the National Gallery, and the East End of 
London ; and to destroy, without rebuilding, the new 
town of Edinburgh, the north suburb of Geneva, and 
the city of New York." Many thought the man was 
mad ; some were enthusiastic over his attack on " com- 
mercialism." " No other man in England," wrote Car- 
lyle to Emerson, " that I meet has in him the divine 
rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Rus- 
kin has, and that every man ought to have." In this 
attack on the " Iron Age " Ruskin was untiring, even 
when he wrote m'Prceterita of his childhood. "I do 
not venture to affirm," he says playfuUy, "that the 
snow of those Christmas holidays was whiter than it is 
now, though I might give some reasons for supposing 
that it remained longer white^ 

But Ruskin did much more than write books. He 
worked with his own hands among the poor. He had 
always held a theory that one should know at first-hand 
what one taught ; so, as he had at one time climbed on 
scaffolds to examine frescoes, he now broke stones on the 



JOHN RUSKIN 457 

road and swept London crossings. Further than this, 
he started a model tea-shop ; he founded collections of 
art at Oxford and Cambridge ; he insisted that his 
books should be beautifully printed, and for that pur- 
pose established the printing house at Orpington ; and 
he gave Miss Octavia Hill the money necessary to sup- 
port her scheme of poor-relief. He soon gave away, in 
fact, all of the £157,000 left him by the rich wine- 
merchant. All over England the traveler runs across 
little institutions of orderly, honest labor, founded by 
Ruskin. Far up Tilberthwaite Ghyll, among the moun- 
tains of the Lake District, one may buy linen at a cot- 
tage industry which received its first impulse from him. 
Much the greatest of his projects, however, was the 
Company of St. George, set forth in Fors Clavigera, 
a series of letters to workingmen. The idea of this com- 
pany, which was scarcely more than a project, was based 
on three Material things — Pure Air, Water, and Earth; 
and on three Immaterial things — Admiration, Hope, 
and Love. " The task of St. George," says Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, " was to slay the dragon of Industrialism ; to 
deliver the people from all the moral and physical abomi- 
nations of city life, and plant them again on the soil of 
an England purified from steam, from filth, and from 
destitution. In this regenerated country there were to 
be no competition, no engines, no huckstering, no fraud, 
no luxury, no idleness, no pernicious journalism, no vain 
erudition or mechanical book-learning." In course of 
time " Bishops " and " Centurions," to satisfy Ruskin's 
Tory taste, were to be introduced ; and wine was allowed, 
if it was more than ten years old ! The effort failed in- 
deed, after seven years of thought and work ; but it was 
the vanguard of the better class of socialistic movements 



458 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

which have followed, the first futile effort of an earnest 
lover of mankind to do the work of the twentieth 
century. 

Unfortunately, in his attitude toward steam and cities 
Ruskin soon grew bitter ; his voice was often shrill and 
querulous. The truth is that it was the natural cry of 
the forlorn hope, and a very sad cry. Consider the odds 
against him. In the first place his health, always weak, 
had suffered grievously from several severe lung afflic- 
tions. Next, his projects were chiefly failures ; his single 
efforts against the " dragon of Industrialism " seemed 
unavailing ; and it cost him dear to care so much and 
yet to fail. Further, he was again disappointed in love. 
Far back, in 1858, he had given drawing lessons to one 
Rosie La Touche, aged ten, and as years went on he 
fell in love with her, after his wont. She, however, was 
a Roman Catholic, and could not think, says Mr. Col- 
lingwood, of being " yoked with an unbeliever." So in 
1872 she refused him. Three years later she died, and 
he, by way of consolation, fell into a half-dehrious love 
of a vision of St. Ursula. The disappointment in 1840 
was serious enough; but the suffering of the old man 
in 1872 is pathetic beyond words. But this is not all. 
The death of his father in 1864 and his mother in 1871 
did not leave so sensitive a nature unscarred. Still more, 
he suffered in 1878 from a mental malady, during the 
attacks of which he may hardly be held responsible for 
his utterances. Lastly, repelled by the Calvinism of his 
youth, bewildered by the turmoil of religious opinion 
caused by the war between dogma and science, he had 
fallen, along with Carlyle and other free-thinkers, into 
fits of pessimism when it seemed as if nothing could save 
the world. Is it to be wondered at that he grew queru- 



JOHN RUSKIN 459 

lous ? His life at this time has been compared to Swift's, 
without the savage cynicism, but with all the tragic, for- 
lorn despair. Indeed, he saw the sad likeness himself. 
" The peace in which I am at present," he wrote to Pro- 
fessor Charles E. Norton, " is only as if I had buried 
myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with 
blood." 

Towards the end, happily, there came over him a 
serener mood. His health improved slightly, and he 
amused himself with writing Prceterita (1885-89), 
suggested by Professor Norton, When his mother died 
he gave up the house at Denmark Hill, London, where 
the family had lived since 1843, and bought Brantwood, 
on Lake Coniston. Here, under the kind care of his 
cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, he spent his last days 
peacefully, reading, entertaining visitors, and filling the 
simple mountain folk with his kindliness. He passed 
many hours, it is said, gazing wistfully across the lake 
toward the mountain, Coniston Old Man. He was now 
out of the maelstrom and on the quiet stream, " too full 
for sound or foam." He died quietly, January 20, 1900, 
and was buried, without pomp or black pall, both of 
which he detested, in Coniston churchyard. 

Yet those who know only the last years of Euskin 
too often think of him as a gentle, venerable man. 
Through the greater part of his life his spirit was 
tossed within him. In his turbulence and his unat- 
tained ideals, when one remembers the frail, suffering 
body and mind, lies the tragic touch that gives his 
prophecy sublimity. For he was a prophet — alone with 
Carlyle the greatest of the century. However critics 
may disagree as to the rightness of his views on art and 
sociology, all are unanimous that his spirit was right, 



460 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

that his influence was beneficent. The twentieth century 
will probably not establish a St. George's Company, but 
it must look for inspiration to the man who could dream 
of such a company. " I grew," he says in ProBterita^ 
" also daily more and more sure that the peace of God 
rested on all the dutiful and kindly hearts of the labo- 
rious poor ; and that the only constant form of pure 
religion was in useful work, faithful love, and stintless 
charity." 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 

If one were asked to select a typical Englishman of 
the nineteenth century, several reasons could be urged 
for the choice of Matthew Arnold. He had the physi- 
cal characteristics ; he was a large, handsome man, in- 
tensely fond of the outdoor life, and a real lover of 
nature. He belonged to that upper middle class which 
has produced England's finest men and women. He 
loved the beaten cause, and was profoundly attached to 
Oxford as "the home of beaten causes," as the citadel 
of conservatism. He loved the English Church. No one 
has paid a higher tribute to the English nobility in its 
best estate than Arnold paid in his illustration of a 
passage in Homer by the anecdote of Lord Granville. 
He was more than conservative in his admiration of the 
classics and in his insistence upon their value for edu- 
cation and culture. Yet throughout his life Matthew 
Arnold was the most persistent and effective critic of 
English life and English temperament. He named the 
upper classes "barbarians," and railed at the great 
middle class as "Philistines." He did more to under- 
mine the dogmas of his own church than those scientific 
opponents of religion whose attitude he so deplored. 
He lauded the very qualities, say of the French or of 
the German mind, at which Englishmen were wont to 
scoff, and poured remorseless satire on that inaccessi- 
bility to ideas which marked his countrymen. Breaking 
away from the practice of English poets, he maintained 
that the beauty of the whole poem should be achieved 



462 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

even at the cost of beauty in the parts ; and in his own 
poetry, as in his admirable critical essays, he held to 
this theory of art. His criticism was avowedly based on 
the principles of his master, the foreign Sainte-Beuve. 
By his vocation an inspector of schools, he condemmed 
the national system; and while he was proud enough 
in his heart of Rugby and Winchester, proud of his 
father's great record, he was unwearied in an affection- 
ate contempt of English public schools — " those ab- 
surd cock-pits," he calls them — and their lamentably 
inadequate instruction. So, too, with university educa- 
tion. Nobody ever dealt out keener satire upon its 
defects; nobody ever really loved and appreciated Ox- 
ford more than Matthew Arnold. The truth is that, 
like the England of his day, he was made up of two 
elements. One held fast to the traditions of his race 
and his creed ; the other welcomed whatever seemed 
good in the world of new and of foreign ideas. 

Matthew Arnold was born at Laleham, in the Thames 
valley, December 24, 1822. His father, the greatest 
of English head -masters, Dr. Thomas Arnold, trans- 
mitted to this eldest son more of the qualities which 
made Arnold of Eugby so influential and so famous 
than the son's contemporaries would have allowed. Dr. 
Arnold was a fearless liberal ; so was the son. But a 
liberal in 1832 could still be a piUar of the English 
Church and an ardent supporter of the party which 
passed the reform bill ; the liberalism of the second half 
of the century, that of the enlightened men like Arnold 
himself, not that of what he calls " the vulgar liberals," 
was forced into quite different channels. In personal 
characteristics father and son were not unlike. Both 
were uncompromising in their ideals of conduct, of per- 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 463 

sonal purity, and in their love of truth, their hatred of 
a lie. The vehement altruism of the elder man, his in- 
sistence on active and vital religion, what was called 
" muscular Christianity," was equally prominent in the 
son, though he had another conception of Christianity 
itself, and allowed his vein of playfulness and satire to 
take the place of the earnestness and directness which 
so well became Dr. Arnold as a preacher and a teacher 
in direct contact with youth. How keenly the son ap- 
preciated his father's noble nature can be read in the 
beautiful lines of Rughy Chapel. His mother was 
Mary Penrose, daughter of a clergyman ; and while the 
letters which Arnold wrote her with unfailing regularity 
until her death in 1873 show no great store of epigram 
and phrase, they are not only the outcome of a deep 
affection, but clear evidence that she appreciated her 
son's work and sympathized with his ideas. She must 
have transmitted to him something of the charm and 
delicate flavor which he displayed in his best efforts, as 
well as that accessibility to ideas which he always pro- 
fessed. Dean Stanley wrote Arnold upon her death : 
"She retained the lifelong reverence for your father's 
greatness, without a blind attempt to rest in the form 
and letter of his words; " and Arnold comments : " This 
is exactly true." 

In 1828 Thomas Arnold was elected head-master 
of Rugby, and moved thither with his family ; but two 
years later Matthew was sent back to Laleham as a 
pupil of the Rev. Mr. Buckland, an uncle, and remained 
there until 1836, when he went to Winchester. His 
biographer notes the cleverness which enabled the boy 
to take a high place in the school and so to escape much 
of the "austerity" of the Winchester system. After a 



464 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

year, he entered Rugby, living with his father in the 
school-house. Readers of Toim Browni's School-Days 
will recall the scene where Tom is sent to the doctor's 
rooms and finds that awful person in familiar play with 
the children, a picture drawn from life. We hear of 
a poem, Alaric at Home, winning a school prize for 
the boy of seventeen ; and the next year, 1841, after 
obtaining a classical scholarship at Balliol CoUege, Ox- 
ford, and then a " school-exhibition," he goes into resi- 
dence in the university which he loved so tenderly and 
scolded with such amiable persistence. 

Matthew Arnold is the poet of Oxford. His two 
poems, Thyrsis, a monody on the death of his friend 
Arthur Hugh Clough, and The Scholar- Gypsy, abound 
in allusions to " that sweet city with her dreaming spires " 
and to the beautiful country about it. They are not 
only a kind of poetical guide-book to the place, but 
they have in more subtle ways the Oxford note, a note 
which Arnold himself sounds in nearly aU his written 
work. Like Oxford, he was apparently supercilious, 
apart, exactly the opposite of the popular or " genial " 
man. Like Oxford, too, he was not really supercilious, 
not at all the " superior person," but simply one who 
was not to be taken in by the shows of things or by 
popular clamor, — one who knew his own position and the 
value of his own opinion and was frank enough to state 
his exact estimate of himself. " I have just seen an 
American," he writes his mother from Paris, in 1865, 
" a great admirer of mine, who says that the three peo- 
ple he wanted to see in Europe were James Martineau, 
Herbert Spencer, and myself. His talk was not as our 
talk, but he was a good man." It would be easy to com- 
ment on this as insufferable conceit ; but it is nothing of 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 465 

the kind. He writes just what he thinks ; and what one 
would most Hke to investigate is the sincerity of the 
American. The attitude of Arnold is, of course, his 
own ; but it is impossible not to recognize in it the influ- 
ence of his Oxford training. Of his university experience 
the facts are easily told. A charming, witty, keen, and 
robust companion, noted among a group of notable young 
men, he won a fair share of the honors and absorbed all 
the delights of Oxford life. In 1842 he gained the Hert- 
ford scholarship, and in 1848 the Newdigate prize for 
a poem on Cromwell. For this poem he received ten 
pounds from the publishers, and saw the sale of some 
seven hundred copies. He took only a second class in 
the final classical schools, but his ability was conceded, 
and in March, 1845, he was elected Fellow of Oriel 
College. That is the record of events ; for the inner 
work, the making of his character, his own words will 
suffice, not only in the various special tributes which he 
pays to Oxford, such as the famous passage in the in- 
troduction to his Essays in Criticism, but in the sum- 
mary, so to speak, which opens his address on Emerson : 
" Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Ox- 
ford, voices were in the air there which haunt my mem- 
ory still. . . . No such voices . . . are sounding there 
now." He goes on to tell of Newman and the sermons 
at St. Mary's " in the most entrancing of voices ; " and 
he speaks once more of those " last enchantments of the 
Middle Age which Oxford sheds around us." It is the 
spirit of the passage, not its letter, which reveals Ar- 
nold's indebtedness to his university ; without under- 
standing how great this indebtedness was, one cannot 
comprehend him as a man. 

A brief experience in teaching classics to the fifth 



466 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

form at Rugby was followed, in 1847, by Arnold's per- 
manent engagement as private secretary to Lord Lans- 
downe, a member of the English government. He came 
into this indirect public activity at a time when affairs 
were of the most exciting kind. The revolutions of 1848 
were breaking out on the Continent, and England had 
its own alarms. " It will be rioting here, only," wrote Ar- 
nold to his mother after witnessing the doings of a great 
mob in Trafalgar Square ; and he was a true prophet. 
But he saw clearly the abuses of the political and social 
system in England, and had already turned to those 
ideas which he afterwards preached so strenuously as 
the only hope for true reform. Meanwhile he continued 
his poetical efforts, but in a very unobtrusive way. The 
Strayed Reveller and Other Poems appeared in 1849 
in an edition of five hundred copies, of which few were 
sold. The rest were withdrawn, and the book is now 
very rare ; " A " was the only clue to authorship afforded 
by the title-page. In 1852 he published Empedocles on 
Mtna^ and Other Poems ; but again few copies were 
sold, and the edition was withdrawn. The year before, 
he had been appointed inspector of schools under gov- 
ernment, and was thus enabled to set up a household. 
June 10, 1851, he married Frances Lucy, daughter of 
Sir William Wightman, a judge of the Court of Queen's 
Bench. The letters which he wrote to his wife, the " Flu" 
of his other correspondence, now from a school in Ips- 
wich which he is examining, now from the other side 
of England, now from Paris, show not only the tre- 
mendous amount of work which Arnold had to do away 
from home, but also the fuU happiness and helpfulness 
of his married life. Writing in October, 1851, he refers 
cheerfully to the " moving about," and says they " can 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 467 

always look forward to retiring to Italy on £200 a 
year ; " in such a case he will do what he can " in the 
literary way " to increase the income. His harmless and 
playful irony, turned as readily on himself as on others, 
gives one a wrong impression of the amount of hard 
work which he did and of the responsibility which he 
felt. *'I write this very late at night," runs a passage 

in his letter to a friend, " with S , a young Derby 

banker, tres sport., completing an orgy in the next room. 
When that good young man is calm, these lodgings are 
pleasant enough." Nothing could be more typical of Ar- 
nold than this bright bit of information; the reader smiles 
at the irony, envies the easy mood, admires the phrase, 
and passes lightly over a following sentence about the 
"battle of life as an inspector of schools." Indeed, 
most of the work by which we know Matthew Arnold 
was written, like the letter, " very late at night," while 
the work by which he lived and supported his family 
was full day's labor punctually and conscientiously done. 
Moreover, while he was well aware of the quality of his 
verse, and knew that it could never take the public by 
storm as Tennyson's poetry did, and while he was bound 
to satisfy his artistic conscience first and let the popu- 
lar approval come as it might, he was nevertheless fairly 
hopeful that he might win his way as a poet. Of his 
three main activities, poetry occupied his younger man- 
hood, social and religious reform his later days, and 
literary criticism his entire maturity. In 1853 appeared 
Poems., hy Matthew Arnold; it contained the new 
Sohrab and Rustum and many pieces from the other 
two anonymous volumes, but perhaps more important 
than anything else in the book was his critical preface. 
It is not too much if one calls this preface the begin- 



468 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ning of a new epoch in English criticism. In 1855 
came out a second series of poems, of which the most 
notable was Balder Dead. He writes to his sister that 
he thinks Balder will " consolidate the peculiar sort of 
reputation " which he got by Sohrah and Rustum. 
As a matter of fact, he never earned much money from 
his poems, though one is not to take too seriously his 
remark to the tax commission that they saw before 
them " an unpopular author." He could be complacent 
on occasion, and never underrated his poetical powers 
in earnest; thus he records the remark of Lord John 
Russell that Matthew Arnold was the only young poet 
of really great promise. He likes to note that a review 
in the Times "has brought Empedocles to the rail- 
way bookstall at Derby." In 1857 he was elected Pro- 
fessor of Poetry at Oxford ; and the next year he 
published his Merope as a kind of manifesto of his 
poetical creed. In 1867 appeared his New Poems., and 
if he had printed nothing but Thy r sis, the monody on 
the death of his friend, the poet Clough, this would 
have been a notable volume. 

But it was criticism in which Arnold was to make his 
main appeal to the public. His Oxford lectures On 
Translating Homer were published in 1861, and led 
to considerable controversy both of the pleasant and 
of the unpleasant kind. In 1865 came out the JEssays 
in Criticism, a most important book. If not a popular 
author, he was now one of the best known men of let- 
ters in England ; for already, amid the judgments on 
books and writers, had begun to peep out those stric- 
tures on the social, political, and religious shortcomings 
of his countrymen by which he made his widest appeal. 
He was now, since 1858, living in London ; and the old 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 469 

monotony of provincial visits was further broken by a 
long tour on the Continent as a commissioner to inves- 
tigate foreign methods of education. This was in 1859 ; 
again in 1865 he spent eight months abroad on the 
same errand. Articles in magazines, a collection of lec- 
tures such as the Study of Celtic Literature, an occa- 
sional pamphlet like his England and the Italian Ques- 
tion^ revision of his poems, and the hard round of his 
professional duties, fill up these years. In 1868 he lost 
his youngest child. The entry in his commonplace book 
is pathetically brief ; and Mr. Eussell found him on the 
day after the child's death " consoling himself with Mar- 
cus Aurelius." The family had moved to Harrow, so 
as to be near the school ; and here they lived until 1873, 
when they moved to Cobham, which was Arnold's home 
for the next fifteen years, until his death. 

Probably as a result of increasing interest in the 
whole human question, Arnold's work now dealt some- 
what less with books and somewhat more with life. His 
Friendship' s Garland, 1871, is one of the most suc- 
cessful of his works, and satirizes that object of Arnold's 
keenest criticism, the great middle class of England, the 
Philistines, with an almost exuberant humor. A more 
serious attack on the social ideas of Englishmen is his 
Culture and Anarchy. Taking a phrase from Swift in 
praise of " sweetness and light," Matthew Arnold now 
threw in the teeth of his countrymen the reproach of 
their almost total lack of these supreme qualities. It 
was an easy step, too, from manners and politics to re- 
ligion. In 1870 he began his plea for a more rational 
view of the religious question with a book — its con- 
tents had appeared in the Cornhill Magazine — on 
St. Paul and Protestantism; it was followed in 1873 



470 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

by Literature and Dogma, where certain bishops of the 
English Church were not too respectfully treated, and 
in 1875 by God and the Bible. 

He was now regarded as the first literary critic of 
his age and country, although the public was not in- 
clined to rate his religious contributions as important. 
Many of his friends, even, thought this work a waste 
of time, and mourned for the poetry that he might have 
produced. Opposition of course was active ; and he de- 
clined a second election as Oxford professor of poetry, 
for fear of the " religious row " which would ensue. A 
leading article in the Athenoeum seriously considered 
his claims to the title of best English poet, placing him 
in some respects ahead of Tennyson and Browning. But 
he wrote little poetry in these years; two poems, how- 
ever, the beautiful Ode on the death of his friend Dean 
Stanley and the pathetic Geisfs Grave, will always 
be regarded as supporting the regrets of his friends 
that he produced so little verse. Meanwhile he did ex- 
cellent service to the cause of .poetry in general by writ- 
ing the introduction to Ward's collection of English 
Poets, and by publishing selections from Wordsworth 
and from Byron. 

In 1883 Gladstone assigned him a pension of .£250 
from the literary fund, and the same winter he visited 
America to give a course of lectures. These Discourses 
in America — one on " Numbers," attacking the prob- 
lem of good government and social organization, one on 
" Literature and Science," and one on " Emerson " — 
showed him in undiminished vigor of thought and phrase. 
The newspapers made gentle fun of his manner, and 
there was nothing popular in the course ; but it won 
him many new friends and earned him a fair amount 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 471 

of money. His daughter married an American, and 
Arnold made another visit in the States in 1886. This 
time his enjoyment of the journey was marred by ill 
health. He had inherited from his father a tendency to 
heart disease, and was now aware of its actual presence ; 
but in his letters, he speaks calmly of the prospect of 
sudden death. In 1885 and 1886 he was still busy in- 
vestigating foreign schools, though he complains of the 
cold, and, at times, of his own suffering. In November, 
1886, he retired from his active duties as inspector of 
schools. In April, 1888, he went to Liverpool to meet 
his daughter, who had sailed thither from New York. 
On Tuesday, the 15th, while hastening towards the 
docks, he fell, and died without regaining conscious- 
ness. 



CHARLES DICKENS 

Whatever the minor merits or defects in the char- 
acter of Dickens, two great features stand out clearly — 
his kindliness and his courage. To the whole human 
race he reached a hand of cheer and comfort. Children 
loved him. It was this great heart of his that caused 
Thackeray's children to ask their father why he did not 
write books like Mr. Dickens's, and grown persons to 
cry, at mention of his name, " God bless him ! " His 
unfailing good spirits through the last years of illness 
close fittingly a story of sweetness and courage. Once 
in a speech, in which he spoke of the actor's having 
" sometimes to come from scenes of sickness, of suffer- 
ing, ay, even of death itself, to play his part," he added 
that " all of us, in our spheres, have as often to do 
violence to our feelings, and to hide our hearts in fight- 
ing this great battle of life, and in discharging our 
duties and responsibilities." Frequently in ill-health, 
married to an uncongenial wife, during his boyhood 
subjected to ignominious labor, Dickens had as much 
cause as the average man to be sad ; yet, outwardly, 
and generally in his family, he was cheerful. Perhaps 
the very struggle which he had to make saved him, 
taught him the larger optimism. Certainly a great deal 
was due to his natural mirthfulness, his inexhaustible 
humor. Still, as has often been observed, mirth is by 
no means cheerfulness, and humor is played about by 
pathos. Dickens's cheerfulness was won hardly and 
could never have been won but for his courage. 



CHARLES DICKENS 473 

These chief characteristics of Dickens are, as every 
one knows, shadowed forth in his books with ever- 
changing, never-ending pathos and humor. Whatever 
purpose they had, — to reform this prison or that char- 
ity school, or to give thousands wholesome amusement, 
or to ridicule the " Circumlocution Office," — they have 
accomplished the greater purpose of preaching the chief 
trait of their author. In nearly all his books, behind 
the gloomy pictures of oppression and poverty, behind 
the loud humor and buffoonery, is his gentleness, his 
genial mirth, his simple faith in mankind. Every one 
has laughed and wept over his books ; no writer of the 
nineteenth century, perhaps of any century, has so given 
his heart to English-reading people. 

There are of course certain other traits very obvious 
in Dickens. He was feverishly ambitious, often for mere 
worldly fame. He had a pride that sometimes was al- 
most akin to vanity. In little things he was unreason- 
ably irritable. Further, still, though he had a fine sense 
of honor and courtesy, he had, it must be granted, a cer- 
tain bluntness of artistic sensibility — a cheap love of 
melodramatic effect ; in the man, as in his books, there is 
too frequently a suggestion of overdone pathos, of humor 
that borders on caricature, of theatrical show. Per- 
sonally, he was always overdressed. Many have sought 
to account for this lack of taste by Dickens's lack of fine 
breeding, by his extremely humble origin. It would be 
indeed remarkable if the son of a Mr. Micawber — 
for such a man was Dickens's father — developed the 
austere taste of an Arnold or a Newman ; Dickens was 
nurtured literally in the streets of London, not in an 
academic grove. Yet in his actions and his manners he 
was in no sense vulgar. The humble-origin argument, 



474 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

one begins to suspect, is too convenient a way, after ex- 
plaining a not very sensitive taste, of bringing against 
Dickens wholly unfair accusations. The facts of his life 
acquit him of commonness. Indeed, as one considers 
them and keeps that humble origin in mind the while, 
one comes more and more to have faith in the " natural 
goodness of man." For below and above all, and through 
all, predominate the man's kindliness and courage, his 
great human heart. 

Charles Dickens, the son of John Dickens and Eliza- 
beth Barrow, was born in Portsea on February 12,1812. 
His father, to posterity Mr. Wilkins Micawber, lived 
in grandiloquent poverty. A clerkship in the navy pay 
office clearly did not support his large family, and after 
a few years, during which he moved to Chatham and 
London, he found himself arrested for debt and well 
settled in the Marshalsea prison. Poor Mrs. Micawber 
— that is, Mrs. Dickens — had set up her " Boarding 
Establishment for Young Ladies ; " " but I never found," 
says Dickens, " that any young lady had ever been to 
school there ; or that any young lady ever came, or pro- 
fessed to come ; or that the least preparation was ever 
made to receive any young lady. The only visitors I 
ever saw or heard of were creditors. They used to come 
at all hours, and some of them were quite ferocious." 
Mrs. Dickens had therefore to abandon the school and 
join her husband in the Marshalsea, where one can fancy 
his saying, " for the first time in many revolving years, 
the overwhelming pressure of pecuniary liabilities was 
not proclaimed from day to day, by importunate voices 
declining to vacate the passage." 

Charles, aged eleven, was put in a slioe-blacking fac- 
tory, with the task, on a salary of six shillings a week. 



CHARLES DICKENS 475 

of pasting labels on bottles — a position he considered 
degrading and one to which he never referred with 
pleasure. During these years of child-labor he subsisted 
for the most part on bread, milk, cheese, and stale pas- 
try, — sometimes on nothing at all ; occasionally there 
was a spree on pudding or a la mode beef. In his own 
words he was a " queer small boy " and he was a sickly 
boy ; how much he suffered can be understood only by 
those who know the pathetic story of little David Cop- 
perfield. 

In 1824 John Dickens, released from prison, took his 
family to the house of a woman who figures as " Mrs. 
Pipchin " in Domhey and Son, quarreled with Lamert, 
his son's employer, and determined, as if by commend- 
able though tardy inspiration, actually to send the boy 
to school. Charles was forthwith put at Wellington 
House Academy, the head master of which, Mr. Jones, 
is said to have been " a most ignorant fellow, and a 
mere tyrant." 

The boy's schooling, however, was a brief and, tech- 
nically, a poor one. In three years it was aU over, such 
as it was, for at fifteen he entered the office of a solici- 
tor, where he stayed till November, 1828. Then, his 
father having become a reporter, the son decided to 
follow the same calling. In his boyhood, nevertheless, 
he did receive a very valuable education — that which 
made Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nicldeby, practically all 
his novels, possible. He was not merely familiar with 
the London streets, as was Macaulay ; he was of them. 
What he wrote down in David Copperfield was not 
what he had observed, but what he had lived. The 
squalor, the pathos, the humor, had entered into his 
soul. There was at least one lesson, in the great school 



476 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

of the world, which Dickens had learned better than 
any one else, — as he was soon abundantly to show. 

At his trade of reporter the young boy of the streets 
worked with zeal. He learned shorthand ; he reported 
for The True Sun, The Mirror of Parliament, and 
The Morning Chronicle, and was soon considered one 
of the quickest reporters in London. Years later he told 
graphically of his experiences. " I have often transcribed 
for the printer," he said, "from my shorthand notes, 
important public speeches, in which the strictest accu- 
racy was required, and a mistake in which would have 
been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing 
on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, 
in a post-chaise and four, galloping through a wild coun- 
try, and through the dead of the night, at the then sur- 
prising rate of fifteen miles an hour. . . . Returning home 
from excited political meetings in the country to the 
waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been 
upset in almost every description of vehicle known in 
this coimtry. I have been, in my time, belated in miry 
by-roads, towards the small hours, forty or fifty miles 
from London, in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted 
horses, and drunken post-boys, and have got back in 
time for publication, to be received with never-forgot- 
ten compliments by the late Mr. Black, coming in the 
broadest of Scotch from the broadest of hearts I ever 
knew." 

Like young David Copperfield, Dickens had his Dora, 
in 1829, when he was a lad of seventeen. In 1855 he 
thus wrote of his feeling to Forster : " I don't quite 
apprehend what you mean by my overrating the strength 
of the feeling of five-and-twenty years ago. If you mean 
of my own feeling, and will only think what the desper- 



CHARLES DICKENS 477 

ate Intensity of my nature is, and that this began when 
I was Charley's age ; that it excluded every other idea 
from my mind for four years, at a time when four years 
are equal to four times four ; and that I went at it with 
a determination to overcome all the difficulties, which 
fairly lifted me up into that newspaper life, and floated 
me away over a hundred men's heads : then you are 
wrong, because nothing can exaggerate that. . . . No 
one can imagine in the most distant degree what pain 
the recollection gave me in Copperfield. And, just as 
I can never open that book as I open any other book, I 
cannot see the face (even at four-and-forty), or hear 
the voice, without going wandering away over the ashes 
of all that youth and hope in the wildest manner." 

Instead of winning his Dora, Dickens unfortunately 
married Catharine Hogarth, the daughter of a fellow 
worker on the Chronicle. He was then unused to the 
society of ladies and would seem to have fallen in love 
generally with all the Hogarth daughters and by ill luck 
to have married the one whom he later found least suited 
to him. He was married in April, 1836, and took his 
wife to live in Furnival's Inn, where their first child, a 
boy, was born. The following year he moved to 48, 
Doughty Street, and in 1839, with improving fortune, 
to 1, Devonshire Terrace. 

In Dickens's case the journalistic road led to substan- 
tial success and early fame. In 1835 he began his hu- 
morous Sketches hy Boz^ in the Monthly Magazine and 
in the Morning and the Evening Chronicle. These were 
continued the following year with such skill that he was 
asked by Chapman and Hall to write humorous papers 
to illustrate the sporting sketches of Seymour. Dickens, 
however, who usually managed to have his own way 



478 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

with publishers, soon brought it about that the sporting 
subject was dropped — except for that gallant sports- 
man, Mr. Winkle — and that Seymour illustrated him. 
After eight numbers Seymour killed himself, and Hablot 
Browne ("Phiz") took up the picture-making. These 
papers, which appeared monthly from April, 1836, to 
November, 1837, were no less than the Posthumous 
Papers of the Pickwick Club, edited by Boz. 

The young humorist sprang into immediate fame. 
As Mr. Chesterton puts it, " Dickens was evidently a 
great man ; unless he was a thousand men." More than 
this, as he wrote Pickwick, as he immortalized Mr. 
Tracy Tupman, Sam WeUer, and Mr. Samuel Pick- 
wick G. C. M. P. C, Dickens stumbled on the best 
sort of subjects for his other novels. Not in ancient 
knights, not in country gentlemen, but in the very crea- 
tures of the London he knew so well, — creatures fat, 
absurd for heroes, unromantic in the usual sense of the 
word, was he to find the characters who were to move 
the whole world to laughter and tears. While Pickwick 
was still going through serial form, in 1837, Oliver 
Twist began to come out in Bentleys Miscellany, and 
in 1839, from January to October, Nicholas Nickleby 
followed. Soon after, in 1840-41, Master Humphrey's 
Clock, which started as a weekly, dropped the Clock 
and developed into The Old Curiosity Shop and Bar- 
naby Pudge. 

The fame of Dickens, although he was not yet thirty, 
was now secure. Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Jingle, 
Fagin, Charley Bates, Squeers, Dick Swiveller, Little 
Nell, and Quilp, to say nothing of many others, were 
important persons, known in almost every household. 
Men of distinction sought the author out and honored 



CHARLES DICKENS 479 

him. He was well acquainted with Carlyle, Washington 
Irving, Ainsworth, Bulwer Lytton, and later with Wilkie 
CoUins, Mrs. Gaskell, and Thackeray. One of his best 
friends was William Macready, the actor ; Dickens him- 
self had a strong turn for the stage, thought at one 
time of becoming a professional player, and often organ- 
ized and acted in excellent amateur theatricals. He had 
already written, indeed, a burlesque. The Strange Gen- 
tleman^ and a comic opera, The Village Coquettes. 
Closest of all his friends was, of course, John Forster, 
his best biographer. 

Dickens was personally a very striking figure. " He 
had a capital forehead," says Forster, " a firm nose with 
full wide nostril, eyes wonderfully beaming with intel- 
lect and running over with humour and cheerfulness, 
and a rather prominent mouth strongly marked with 
sensibility. . . . Light and motion flashed from every 
part " of his face. " It was as if made of steel," said 
Mrs. Carlyle. We to-day are, in fact, too apt to think 
of the elderly, bald, bearded Dickens of photography ; 
the young man, with rich brown hair and clean-shaven 
face, kept to the last only one of his youthful features — 
what Forster calls " the eager, restless, energetic out- 
look." Carlyle gives an interesting picture of him : " He 
is a fine little fellow — Boz, I think. Clear, blue, intel- 
ligent eyes, eyebrows that he arches amazingly, large 
protrusive rather loose mouth, a face of most extreme 
mobility, which he shuttles about — eyebrows, eyes, 
mouth, and all — in a very singular manner while 
speaking. . . . For the rest, a quiet shrewd-looking 
little fellow, who seems to guess pretty well what he 
is and what others are." 

Dickens had long been eager to visit America, the 



480 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

land of democracy, as lie supposed. Urgent invitations 
were extended ; and so on the 4th of January, 1842, 
he set sail with his wife. He was received everywhere 
with ovation. Very soon, however, he grew weary of 
dinners and calls and speeches, and was disappointed 
at not finding the model democracy he expected. His 
discontent was no doubt largely due to his absence 
from London, the home of his inspiration ; but there is 
no mistaking this, written to Macready March 22 : " It 
is of no use, I am disappointed. This is not the repub- 
lic I came to see ; tliis is not the republic of my imagi- 
nation. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy — even 
with its sickening accompaniment of court circulars — 
to such a government as this. ... I see a press more 
mean and paltry and silly and disgraceful than any 
country I ever knew. ... In the respects of not being 
left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by tobacco- 
chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered consider- 
ably." It is true that Dickens was easily irritated by 
insignificant things and that he had not learned that 
he who runs for praise may reap adulation ; but it is 
true, too, that the America of 1842 must have pre- 
sented to an Englishman the ill-assorted vigor and bad 
manners of youth. In those days young Europeans 
were still carried on the wave of revolutionary enthusi- 
asm for a Utopia, and they naturally looked to America. 
Of course they were disappointed ; as they would have 
been with any other land had they cherished the same 
high expectations of it. The German poet Lenau had 
very nearly the same experience as Dickens at very 
nearly the same time — without, of course, the ova- 
tions, which at first pleased Dickens and which later, by 
their iteration, disgusted him. The author of Pickwick 



CHARLES DICKENS 481 

was back in London by June and soon published bis 
American Notes, full of ungentle sayings, and, begin- 
ning with January, 1843, Martin Chuzzlewit, with more 
hits at America. 

Much the most important publication of 1843, how- 
ever, was the Christmas Carol, with illustrations by 
John Leech. It was the first of a number of Christmas 
stories, the next of which was The Chimes, in 1844, 
followed in 1845 by The Cricket on the Hearth. To 
read The Chimes to a choice circle at Forster's house 
on December 2, 1844, was the reason for Dickens's sud- 
den return from Italy, where he had been during the 
fall. Maclise, who was of the party, has made the night 
immortal in his picture : Dickens with his manuscript, 
and among his friends about him Carlyle, Douglas Jer- 
rold, and Forster. The author went back to Italy the 
same month and remained there till the following June. 
In 1846 he began in the Daily News his Pictures 
from Italy. Antiquity had pleased him more than the 
brand-new democracy of America, and Italy hence 
escapes with better treatment. 

Dickens had, in fact, started the Daily News, in 
January, 1846, for the purpose of having a medium 
of expression outside his novels. But after only three 
weeks he resigned his editorship and returned to novel- 
writing. Four years later, however, he discovered a more 
convenient form of periodical in a weekly serial, House- 
hold Words, which he conducted from 1850 to 1859, 
and in which appeared, besides Christmas stories, A 
Child's History of England (1851-53) and Hard 
Times (1854). It was succeeded by a similar weekly, 
All the Year Round, begun in April, 1859, and con- 
tinued by him to his death, 1870, after which his son 



482 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

managed it. In it appeared, besides more CHristmas 
stories, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Hunted Down 
(1860), 2%e Uyicommercial Traveller (1860), and 
Great Expectations (1860-61). 

Nor were these the only fruits of Dickens's inexhaust- 
ible power. The Pictures from Italy were followed, in 
18-46.184:7, and 1848 by Donibey and Son, in twenty- 
monthly numbers. An old charwoman's remark, told 
by Forster, reveals the great popularity of Dickens's 
stories. She lodged at a snuff-shop, where on the first 
Monday of every month the landlord read Dombey 
aloud. "Lawk, Ma'am I " she said one day to ]SIrs. Ho- 
garth, "I thought that three or four men must have put 
together Domhey!"' The intimacy of the woman with 
the book is of course the point for remark, but it is not 
uninteresting that the author's several-handed fertility 
should have struck her in exactly the same way as 
Pickwick struck Mr. Chesterton : it is indeed hard to 
believe that Dickens was one man. For fast on the 
heels of Domhey came David Coppeifeld, begun in 
May, 1849, and finished in serial form in November, 
1850. Other great novels followed in rapid succession. 
Besides what he published in Household Words and 
All the Year Round, Dickens wrote Bleak House 
(1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57), Our 3Iutual 
Friend (1864-65), and The Mystery of Edwin 
Drood (1870), cut short by the author's death. 

Yet through all this success and in spite of his nat- 
ural cheerfulness, Dickens was not wholly happy at 
home. He had been for some time unwontedly irri- 
table and depressed, and finally, in 1858, showed by his 
letters to Forster that the chief trouble, besides failing 
health, lay in Mrs. Dickens, whom he had married in 



CHARLES DICKENS 483 

such a burst of enthusiasm for all the Hogarth daugh- 
ters. "Why is it," he wrote " that, as with poor David, 
a sense comes always crushing on me now, when I 
fall into low spirits, as of one happiness I have missed 
in life, and one friend and companion I have never 
made ? " Again : " We are strangely ill-assorted for 
the bond there is between us." In May, 1858, he and 
his wife agreed to separate, Dickens allowing her <£600 
a year and nothing in his will. 

The weakest thing Dickens did in connection with 
the whole unfortunate affair was to publish a defense of 
himself, in answer to some scandal, thus making the 
matter public ; and to write a letter to his secretary, 
his " violated letter," as he called it, which got into the 
papers. Dickens was strangely sensitive about some 
matters, notably this and certain questions of publica- 
tion, though, oddly enough, he was lacking in the finer 
sensitiveness which would have made him shrink from 
petty public wrangling. 

Just before his separation from his wife, Dickens 
bought Gad's Hill Place, on the London road near 
Rochester. As a boy he had resolved some day to buy 
the house which stood near the scene of Falstaff's en- 
counter with the men in buckram ; and though on his 
travels he always longed for London, he managed to 
break the spell of the metropolis for the dream of his 
boyhood and in 1860 to move permanently to Gad's 
Hill, 

His was nevertheless still the active spirit of earlier 
years. He walked incessantly, often twenty miles a day, 
and filled spare moments with planting trees and shrub- 
bery, making the " tunnel " under the London road, 
and building summer-houses in the " wilderness," a 



484 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

thicket reached by the tunnel. In 1853, moreover, he 
had begun public readings of his works. They were no 
doubt remarkable, for Dickens was a dramatic man 
with a fine voice; indeed even the old Carlyle would 
leave Chelsea to hear them ; but they were no doubt 
not indicative of a very modest taste. Certainly the ex- 
ertion necessary hastened his death. For, once he had 
begun them, and once people expected him, in spite of 
very poor health, to fulfill his engagements, he was the 
indefatigable, active-spirited Dickens of newspaper days. 
He read all over England ; he even visited America 
again, where he found the people ready, with the quick 
recovery of youth, to forget the quarrel of twenty-five 
years before. His audiences were everywhere very large, 
and his pay was proportionate. But the trip to America 
was a great strain on his health ; soon the doctors had 
to forbid his public readings. He retired to Gad's Hill 
to rest, was in pain and without sleep much of the time, 
but outwardly very cheerful and still determined to 
work at Edwin Drood. Suddenly one day, as he rose 
from dinner, he fell by the fireplace, never regained 
consciousness, and died the next day, June 9, 1870. 
He was buried in Westminster Abbey. 

Dickens was only fifty-eight, in full career of middle 
life, when he died. Indeed, when his scant education, 
the struggle he had to make for mere existence, and 
what he did actually achieve are considered, his life is 
a phenomenal record — not so much because of the bulk 
as because of the quality of the work. Many half-for- 
gotten men are buried in the Poets' Corner; but Dick- 
ens has joined those who will be remembered when 
Westminster is forgotten, who have created a few great 
characters more real than living men, — Falstaff, Don 



CHARLES DICKENS 485 

Quixote, Sir Roger, Tristram Shandy. We may be ' ' such 
stufp as dreams are made on ; " but no one dare bring 
such an allegation against the imperishable person of 
Mr. Pickwick. More than this, wherever kindly opti- 
mism, not blatant, cocksure optimism, cheers the faint 
of heart, wherever Scrooges are transformed and Tiny 
Tims are loved, the name of Dickens will be an endur- 
ing and a blessed name. 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 

"Poor Thackeray, adieu, adieu!" wrote Carlyle 
when he heard of the novelist's death ; " he had many 
fine qualities, no guile or malice against any mortal, a 
big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion ; a 
beautiful vein of genius lay struggling about him." Mr. 
Leslie Stephen adds that Thackeray's weakness was 
" the excess of sensibility of a strongly artistic tempera- 
ment." When this excess of sensibility was thrown back 
upon itself by the rebuffs of the world, it found ex- 
pression not, as with Carlyle, in rage and denunciations, 
but in a humor which moved between the extremes of 
laughter and tears, and in that form of fiction which 
exposes the follies and hypocrisy of mankind rather than 
its great vices and great virtues. 

WilHam Makepeace Thackeray was born July 18, 
1811, at Calcutta. His great-grandfather was arch- 
deacon of Surrey, while his grandfather, his father, and 
several of his uncles had been distinguished in the civil 
service of the East India Company. The father died 
when Thackeray was five years old, and the latter was 
sent back to England in 1817, living there with an 
aunt. His mother was married soon after in India to a 
Major Smyth, coming, however, to England with her 
husband in 1821. At the age of eleven Thackeray was 
sent to the Charterhouse School, and remained there till 
he was seventeen. His experiences are described with 
fair accuracy in the story of Pendennis, where the 
school is called Greyf riars, and the place itself is fondly 




In 1854. After a drawing by Samuel Laure 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 487 

pictured in the latter chapters of The Newcomes. Mr. 
Merivale prints the recollections of a school-comrade, 
who remembered breaking Thackeray's nose in a fight, 
and admiring the " little poems and parodies " which 
the victim wrote in the latter years of his course. The 
broken nose remained as a deformity throughout the 
novelist's life, and spoiled an otherwise handsome face. 
Joined with his great height (he was well over six feet), 
his bulk, and the enormous size of his head, this defect 
lent itself easily to caricature, but he was not very 
sensitive about it, and loved to tell how he proposed to 
a traveling showman who had just lost the giant of the 
show, that he should take the giant's place. " You 're 
nigh tall enough," was the answer, "but I'm afraid 
you're too hugly." One of his friends at Charterhouse 
was John Leech, afterwards his fellow worker on Punch. 
After a short residence with his parents in Devonshire, 
where he contributed some verses to a local newspaper, 
he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1829. One 
side of his life here, the dining and wining and expen- 
sive side, may be followed between the lines of Pen- 
dennis's career at Oxbridge, though the weak and con- 
ceited Pen himself is no portrait of the author. As a 
matter of fact, he made friends among the best men of 
his day, such as Thompson, afterwards Master of Trin- 
ity, who was a member of a little essay club which 
Thackeray himself formed, Edward FitzGerald, King- 
lake, Milnes, Spedding, and Tennyson. The first of 
these friends says that though " careless of university 
distinction," Thackeray " had a vivid appreciation of 
English poetry, and chanted the praises of the old Eng- 
lish novelists, especially his model. Fielding. He had 
always a flow of humor and pleasantry and was made 



488 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

much of by his friends." With regard to actual literary 
effort we hear only of a parody upon Tennyson's prize 
poem of Timbuctoo. He left Cambridge in 1830, taking 
no degree. He now traveled on the Continent and made 
some stay at Weimar, where he met the poet Goethe 
and picked up enough of the language to serve him for 
his delightful translations and for his still more delight- 
ful but harmless satire on the provincial life of that 
day, esj)ecially the pomposities of the little German 
courts. No one has succeeded better than Thackeray in 
portraying the continental watering-places with their 
eternal rouge-et-noir, the cosmopolitan crowd of ad- 
venturers and gamblers, the petty German aristocracy, 
and the haughty English tourists, papa stolid and con- 
temptuous, mamma vigilant and censorious, the daugh- 
ters all innocence and ignorance, and the sons making 
voyages of discovery in roulette. Next year he was set- 
tled in chambers in the Temple reading law, the same 
quarters where his Pendennis and Warrington wrote 
" copy " and led their delightful Bohemian life. 

The fact of Thackeray's transition from the study of 
law to the practice of letters is certain ; but the reasons 
for the change are somewhat obscure. Of course he had 
a strong impulse towards the vocation of author, and in 
Germany had sketched out plans for serious literary 
work. When -^e find him actually writing, however, it 
is to earn his bread. He had a fortune from his father, 
variously stated at from ten to twenty thousand pounds. 
Some of this he sank in unsuccessful journalism. Two 
newspapers in which he invested money along with his 
stepfather came rapidly to grief. Funds, moreover, had 
been injudiciously invested, and he lost heavily by the 
failure of an Indian bank, a tragedy which is reflected 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 489 

to some degree in the ruin of Colonel Newcome's great 
project. Worst of all, he had undoubtedly lost large 
sums at play. Walking, in his later days, with Sir 
Theodore Martin through the playrooms at Spa, and 
stopping at the rouge-et-noir table, Thackeray pointed 
out a seedy broken-down man among the gamblers, and 
said, " That was the original of my Deuceace ; I have 
not seen him since the day he drove me down in his 
cabriolet to my brokers in the City, where I sold out 
my patrimony and handed it over to him." The patri- 
mony in this instance seems to have been only £1500 ; 
but there may have been other cases of the kind. Like 
his own Clive Newcome, he thought to earn his living 
by art, and studied hard in Paris. This was in 1834, 
but in 1835 he was already known as a journalist, act- 
ing as the Paris correspondent of a new Liberal news- 
paper. The Constitutional ; and journalist he was to 
remain for years in spite of occasional attempts in the 
other profession, as when, upon the death of Seymour, 
he called on Dickens with two or three drawings in his 
hand and asked permission to go on with the illustra- 
tions of Pickwick. The contrast implied by this inter- 
view has been duly noted by Thackeray's biographers. 
Dickens was about to spring into the full tide of a pop- 
ularity which never failed him, while the young man 
whom he dismissed was to struggle on for a dozen years 
before the public acknowledged his greatness. 

With eight guineas a week for his work as corre- 
spondent, and with no other fortune, Thackeray now 
married, August 20, 1836, a lady of Irish extraction, 
Isabella, daughter of Colonel Shawe. For six months 
he drew his pay, and then his newspaper failed. For a 
while he earned ten francs a day in Paris by writing 



490 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

for Galignani, but came back the next year to London 
and plunged manfully into journalistic work. This work, 
of course, was miscellaneous, — reviews in The Times 
and The Chronicle^ and stories, the most important of 
which were the Yellowplush Pajyers and Catherine^ in 
Fraser^s Magazine. The Shabby- Genteel Story and The 
Great Hoggarty Diamond also date from this period. 
The name he now assumed, " Michael Angelo Titmarsh," 
shows the combination of artist and literary hack which 
he felt himself to be. Unlike Dickens, he was never sure 
of himself or of his fame. Still, his daily life, though 
full of stress and anxiety, was a happy one. Three 
daughters were born, one of whom died in infancy ; but 
in the spring of 1840 his wife's health began to fail, 
and the disease took a distressing turn ; mentally de- 
ranged, she had to be placed under proper care, and 
Thackeray's home was broken up. He took her to Paris, 
and afterwards to Germany ; but her case became hope- 
less, she could not see her husband, and by 1843 Thack- 
eray was living alone in London. A letter of FitzGerald's, 
in 1841, advises a friend to buy Thackeray's little book. 
The Second Funeral of Napoleon, as " each copy sold 
puts l^d. in T.'s pocket; which is not very heavy just 
now, I take it." Critics who sneer at the cynicism of 
Thackeray, a totally unjust term, by the way, even for 
his saddest mood, would do well to recall the manifold 
trials of his early manhood, the brave spirit with which 
he met them, and the tenderness which made him write, 
years afterwards, " though my marriage was a wreck 
... I would do it over again ; for behold Love is the 
crown and completion of all earthly good." He lived 
for some years without attaining any real reputation 
with the public or any substantial returns from his arti- 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 491 

cles and his books ; but it must not be forgotten that 
he had great powers of enjoyment and was no unwilling 
citizen of Bohemia in its more respectable quarters. He 
was an eager and welcome contributor to Punch during 
its earliest years, sending in prose and verse which are 
now included in his works. Best known are his ballads 
and songs, like The Cane- Bottomed Chair and The 
Ballad of Bouillabaisse. The Snob Papers, too, first 
appeared in Punch; and those "prize novelists" which 
parody so well the stories of Disraeli, Lever, and others. 
His connection with Punch ended about 1854, and the 
breach was due to his disapproval of the paper's atti- 
tude towards certain questions of the day. In 1842 he 
made a tour in Ireland to gather materials for his Irish 
Sketch-Booh, which appeared the next year. In 1844 
Praser^s Magazine printed his Barry Lyndon, now re- 
garded as a masterpiece, but then little heeded ; this 
was "by Fitz-Boodle," as his Catherine, in the same 
magazine, had been "by Ikey Solomons, Esq. junior," 
and The Yellowplush Correspondence, Pashionable 
Pax and Polite Anny goats, " by Charles Yellowplush." 
The same year, 1844, FitzGerald reports him " writing 
hard for half a dozen reviews and newspapers all the 
morning." 

But this long time of trial and obscurity came at last 
to an end. By January, 1847, Thackeray was settled 
in a house of his own in Kensington, and was writing 
Vanity Fair. Refused by the editor of Colhurn's Maga- 
zine, it was published, like Dickens's novels, in monthly 
parts, the last of which appeared in July, 1848, wheq 
its author was thirty-seven years old. At last he had 
found the public. Mrs. Carlyle, no mild critic, thought 
that he " beat Dickens out of the world." In December, 



492 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

1847, Charlotte Bronte dedicated to Thackeray the 
second edition of her immensely popular Jane Eyre. 
Moreover, he was taken up by that very society which 
Vanity Fair satirizes with such tireless power ; and 
some of his old friends complained, unjustly enough, 
that he was dangling about noblemen's houses and for- 
getting the companions of his adversity. Whatever his 
change of life, he was now recognized as one of the fore- 
most writers of his day. In eight years he produced his 
best work ; Vanity Fair was followed by Fendennisy 
which reflects much of his own experience, in 1850, 
by Esmond in 1852, and by The Newcomes in 1855. 
Of these, Esmond^ which is perhaps the best, was 
received with the least enthusiasm ; even Pendennis 
met with some depressing criticism, and its publication 
was suspended for a while by the author's serious ill- 
ness in the autumn of 1849. But Thackeray had a 
secure hold upon the reading world, and gained a good 
income from these books. It is true that his satire made 
him both feared and disliked in some quarters, and he 
was blackballed on his first attempt to enter the Athe- 
naeum Club ; moreover, he spent his money lavishly and 
probably exceeded his income. But almost within a year 
of his rejection he was elected to the Athenaeum; and 
his finances were repaired by a series of lectures which 
he gave in London in 1851, repeating them in other 
cities like Oxford and Edinburgh, and, a year later, 
in America. These were the lectures on The English 
Humourists. Though highly nervous, and the very 
opposite of a "platform man," Thackeray held his 
audiences by the charm of his style and by the simple, 
almost colloquial manner of delivery. His biographers 
insist on the contrast with Dickens; not only was 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 493 

the latter dramatic, rhetorical, confident, where Thack- 
eray was tentative and undemonstrative, but a certain 
florid and insistent style in Dickens sundered him from 
the aristocratic quietness and repression of his rival. 
The plain truth is that nowhere did Thackeray's in- 
stincts as a gentleman tell more than in his manner as 
a public speaker ; and his manner was invariably per- 
fect in public and private alike. " Very uncertain and 
chaotic in all points," wrote Carlyle of him, "except 
his outer breeding, which is fixed enough and perfect 
according to the modern English style." The same con- 
trast is evident when Thackeray visited America and 
gave his lectures there. Not a public criticism of any 
kind upon his hosts was heard, and even his private 
utterances were kindly and appreciative. Dickens, the 
born reporter, eager for copy, works everything ludi- 
crous, crude, and outrageous into his American Notes 
and Martin Chuzzlewit ; Thackeray, in his Virgin- 
ians, a not altogether successful sequel to Esmond, 
completed, in 1859, takes a precisely opposite course. 
It was in October, 1852, that Thackeray sailed for Bos- 
ton in the company of his countryman, A. H. Clough, 
and of James Russell Lowell. After more than a month 
of lecturing and visiting, he writes to an intimate friend 
that he likes the people, finds many "pleasant com- 
panions" who are "natural and well-read and well-bred 
too." He notes the rush and restlessness of American 
life, but is not displeased with it. He made about ten 
thousand dollars, it would seem, by his lectures, and 
returned home in the spring of 1853. In October, 1855, 
he visited America again, extending his tour well into 
the South and West. Instead of his previous lectures 
on The English Humourists, he now gave his course on 



494 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The Four Georges ; and some of his English critics were 
inclined to sneer at him for truckling to American pre- 
judices by his satire and ridicule of the kings and by 
his praise of Washington. It must be remembered, how- 
ever, that he gave the same lectures afterward in Eng- 
land, getting fifty guineas a night and being received, 
especially at Oxford and Edinburgh, with great enthu- 
siasm. 

It was probably the success of these lectures which 
induced Thackeray in 1857 to stand for Parliament for 
the city of Oxford. He advocated the Liberal policy 
of a limited extension of the suffrage ; but though he 
spoke well and made an earnest struggle, he was beaten 
by the narrow margin of sixty votes, and went back, 
after a campaign which was highly creditable both to 
himself and his opponent, to his literary tasks. It must 
be admitted that his writings, so far as fiction is con- 
cerned, never rose to their former level. The Virgini- 
ans showed distinct decline, and the novel, Lovel the 
Widower^ which he wrote for the Cornhill Magazine^ a 
shilling periodical which now began under his editor- 
ship, has very little to recommend it. On the other 
hand, the essays which he published as editor of this 
magazine under the title of Roundabout Papers^ con- 
tain some of his most admirable work and have the 
full charm of his style. But Thackeray had long been 
in ill health ; his late hours and lack of exercise com- 
bined, in spite of his pleasant home life, to aggravate 
an already serious complaint. He often suffered from 
severe spasms of pain ; and his paper on " Dr. Edin- 
burgh" and "Dr. London" may well reflect his own 
premonitions of a near and sudden death. Though by 
no means what is called a pious man, he held steadily 



WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 495 

to the belief of his church and looked cheerfully into the 
future. " Can't you fancy sailing into the calm ? " he 
wrote to a friend. For him to die was to go " out of our 
stormy life " and " nearer the Divine light and warmth." 
In March, 1862, he practically resigned his task as 
editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Throughout this year 
and the next he lived in the old way, concluding his 
Adventures of Philip for the Cornhill, and working on 
a promising novel, Denis Duval, which, like Dickens's 
Edwin Drood, was left unfinished. Very sensitive to 
criticism, and holding strictly to his rights as a gentle- 
man, Thackeray had, in 1858, hotly resented an article 
printed in Town Talk by the editor, Edmund Yates, 
who spoke of the novelist as one who "cut his coat ac- 
cording to the cloth," flattering the aristocracy at home 
and the democracy abroad. Thackeray forced the Gar- 
rick Club to expel Yates, who refused to make " ample 
apology ; " but the latter had the aid and comfort of 
Dickens in this contest ; and the two great writers were 
estranged for three or four years. It is pleasant to know 
that big-hearted Thackeray made the advances which 
led to reconciliation. With all his sensitiveness, he had 
no petty jealousies ; his admiration of Dickens was 
unfeigned and was communicated freely to his friends. 
No more charming letters were ever written than those 
which Thackeray dashed off in the intervals of his work, 
often with a caricature or other sketch, and often, it 
must be admitted, with an atrocious pun or so into 
the bargain. His generosity was lavish, and spared 
neither his money nor his pen. One of his best essays 
appeared in the Times, to support an exhibition of 
Cruikshank's drawings and bring relief for a brother 
artist. His own affairs were in good case j and in the 



496 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

spring of 1862 he had moved into a new house of an-. 
usually ample and luxurious design. Among his close 
friends of these latter days were Sir Theodore and Lady 
Martin, the latter best known as Helen Faucit, a charm- 
ing actress who had made the heroines of Shakespeare 
her special study. His daughters, too, were all that a 
father could desire; and there was no lack of "that 
which should accompany old age " in the last scenes 
of Thackeray's life. In December, 1863, he seemed in 
ordinary health, though confined to bed for a few days 
by one of his attacks. Recovering, he spoke cheerfully 
to Dickens about the work he had in hand ; but on the 
23d he went to rest in some pain, was heard moving 
about in the night, and must have died, as TroUope 
conjectures, between two and three o'clock on the morn- 
ing of the 24th. He was buried on the 30th in Kensal 
Green Cemetery. 



GEORGE ELIOT 

" There 's allays two 'pinions," says Mr. Macey in 
Silas Marner ; " there 's the 'pinion a man has of him- 
sen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him." 
Just at present the sagacity rather than the humor of 
this statement is the point for remark. The fairness of 
Mr. Macey, his desire to give both sides of the ques- 
tion fair play, was highly characteristic of his creator. 
George Eliot was certainly conspicuous among women 
for the masculine nature of her thought : its vigor, its 
philosophic zeal, its eagerness for truth. She sought 
earnestly, whether in poem, essay, or novel, to discover 
the moral motives underlying society. Her chief claim 
to renown, of course, lies in the skill with which she 
could follow those motives through the lives of charac- 
ters in her novels. 

The charge that her eagerness to teach her moral 
discoveries got the better of her, especially in her later 
works, is not wholly unfair. " She was born to please," 
writes one, " but unhappily persuaded herself, or was 
persuaded, that her mission was to teach the world, 
. . . and, in consequence, an agreeable rustic writer 
. . . found herself gradually uplifted until, about 1875, 
she sat enthroned on an educational tripod, an almost 
ludicrous pythoness." Though this estimate may go a 
little too far, it is nevertheless true that her pedantic 
manner obscures for many the full lustre of her genius. 
Still, in extenuation of the position of teacher which to 
many she seemed unduly to assume, it must be remem- 



498 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

bered that after the death of Dickens in 1870 she was 
really the greatest living novelist and that the reading 
public of England did look to her for instruction. 

Yet from all accounts, this heavy manner of writing 
did not destroy the charm of her personality in con- 
versation. Personally unattractive to strangers, she im- 
pressed those who knew her as a woman of extraordinary 
intellect and high ideals. Though her ways of thinking 
were vigorously masculine, her quick sensibility and 
affection were strikingly feminine ; and the absolute 
necessity she felt for a supporting, sympathetic com- 
panion was also singularly feminine. 

Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, known to fame as 
George Eliot, was born at South Farm, Arbury, in 
Warwickshire, on November 22, 1819. Her father, 
Robert Evans, who had married Christiana Pearson as 
his second wife in 1813, was the son of a carpenter and 
was himself agent of one Francis Newdigate for estates 
in Derbyshire and Warwickshire. A few months after 
Mary Ann's birth the family removed to Griff House, 
on the high road near Nuneaton. About her childhood 
there was very little remarkable except the signs, to 
which her chief biographer, Mr. Cross, calls attention, 
of " the trait that was most marked in her through life 
— namely, the absolute need of some one person who 
should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be 
all in all." The country in which she grew up and the 
manners of the people there are familiar to readers of 
Scenes from CleAcal Life, Adam Bede^and TTie Mill 
on the Floss. When she was five she was sent to Miss 
Lathom's School at Attleborough, near Nuneaton, and 
three years later to Miss Wallington's large school in 
Nuneaton. By this time she had begun to read consid- 



GEORGE ELIOT 499 

erably, such books as The Pilgrinis Progress, Defoe's 
History of the Devil, Rasselas, and the works of Scott 
and Lamb. When she was twelve she went to the 
Misses Franklin's school at Coventry, only to be called 
home at fifteen by the fatal illness of her mother. The 
death of Mrs. Evans in 1836 and the marriage of the 
eldest daughter, Christiana, in 1837, threw the charge 
of the household at Griff on Mary Ann. 

Now begins one of the hardest yet perhaps most fruit- 
ful chapters of her life. The keeping of household ac- 
counts, the purchase of provisions, the making of butter 
and jelly and cheese occupied much of her time ; but 
though she had to give up regular schooling, she did 
not, in spite of weak health, abandon her intellectual 
pursuits. Besides reading widely in English, she studied 
German, Italian, and science, and found time to play 
the piano for her father, who was very fond of music. 
She herself was already a skillful musician. In 1841, 
when her brother Isaac married and succeeded to his 
father's position at Griff House, she retired with the 
latter to Foleshill, near Coventry, and there formed a 
close friendship with the Brays. Mr. Bray, a wealthy 
ribbon manufacturer and a man of great culture, who 
often had as guests such men as Emerson and Froude, 
gave an added stimulus to the intellectual zeal of young 
Miss Evans. She took lessons in Greek and Latin, 
renewed her modern language studies with her old 
Coventry teacher, Signor Brezzi, and worked by her- 
self at Hebrew. " She had no petty egotism, no spirit 
of contradiction," said one who knew her. " She never 
talked for effect. A happy thought well expressed filled 
her with delight : in a moment she would seize the point 
and improve upon it — so that common people began 



500 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

to feel themselves wise in her presence." It was not 
strange that under the influence of the Brays she should 
renounce the unthinking, dogmatic faith of her youth 
and resolve, at the end of 1841, to give up going to 
church. This brought on trouble with her father, a 
devout church-goer ; Miss Evans went to live with her 
brother and talked of teaching at Leamington ; but 
after a few months' dispute, she returned to take care 
of her old father, attended church as before, and was so 
influenced by the event that she resolved never to say 
in her books anything to shake the religious faith of 
her readers. 

About this time (1842) her literary labors began. 
Her earliest published piece was a poem in the Chris- 
tian Observer for January, 1840. Two years later she 
undertook to finish the translation of Strauss's Leben 
Jesu^ and finally published her work in June, 1846. 
Soon after, though her study continued, she was fre- 
quently depressed by the failing health of her father, 
and after his death, in 1849, save for the friendship 
with the Brays, she was constantly in the depths of 
melancholy. Some time was spent abroad, but except 
in study she was aimless and unhappy, in an intellectual 
solitude. In 1851 her work in connection with the 
Westminster Review gave her anew interest and indi- 
rectly brought about her greatest good fortune. For 
through Mr. Chapman, the editor, she became intimate 
with Herbert Spencer, and through the latter met 
George Henry Lewes. For a short time she continued 
her work on the Westminster Review, she translated 
Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (1854), and then 
through Spencer and Lewes was urged to try her hand 
at fiction. 



GEORGE ELIOT 501 

Of her -union in 1854 with Lewes there is now little 
need for discussion. A legal divorce from his wife, who 
was living separated from him, was impossible on a 
technical ground, he having forgiven her a previous 
offense ; but the benefit of his union with Miss Evans, 
which in a spiritual sense was a most true marriage, is 
not to be questioned. It is sufficient to note that so 
severe a tribunal as the British public has acquitted 
them both. " No legal marriage," says Leslie Stephen, 
" could have called forth greater mutual devotion." 
George Eliot, very much a woman in this respect, was 
miserable without a sympathetic person to lean upon, 
and in Lewes she found all that her nature craved — 
congenial pursuits and a generous spirit. 

Urged on by Lewes, George Eliot wrote Amos Bar- 
ton, her first fiction, in the fall of 1856. Lewes sent 
it to Blackwood, who paid fifty guineas for it and sup- 
posed that the author was a clergyman! It was finally 
published again in the /Scenes Jrom Clerical Life in 

1858. Impelled by the good fortune of these stories, 
she finished Adam Bede, which appeared in February, 

1859. The success was so tremendous that in her later 
work she often despaired of doing so well as in this her 
first attempt at a long novel. Soon she set to work on 
The Mill on the Floss, half reminiscent of her youth. 
It appeared early in 1860. Through its composition she 
was again visited by periods of depression, by torturing 
self -questionings. " I feel no regret," she says to Mrs. 
Bray, "that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure; but 
it is a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong 
in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its 
uses, and given me reason for gladness that such an 
unpromising woman-child was born into the world." 



502 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

After their union George Eliot and Lewes lived 
chiefly in or near London, though much time was spent 
abroad, usually in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy 
The trip which was taken in 1860, immediately after 
the completion of The Mill on the F'loss, gave the 
first suggestion of JRomola, a new kind of novel for 
George Eliot and one accomplished only with difficulty 
and depressing labor. She spent much time in Florence 
accumulating historical matter and putting off the act- 
ual writing, so that, before starting it, she found time 
to write a short novel after her earlier manner. /Silas 
Marner, which was published in 1860, has given us 
Mr. Macey, the personage who along with Mrs. Poyser 
of Adam Bede can safely move in the immortal society 
of Messrs. Pickwick and Micawber. A few extracts 
from the author's journal show what trouble Romola 
caused: "Aug. 1 [1861]. Struggling constantly with 
depression. . . . Aug. 12. Got into a state of so much 
wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts 
on the construction of my story, that I became des- 
perate, and suddenly burst my bonds, saying, I will 
not think of writing ! . . . Oct. 4. My mind still worried 
about my plot — and without any confidence in my 
ability to do what I want. . . . Oct. 31. Still with an 
incapable head — trying to write, trying to construct, 
and unable." The novel was at last fairly started on 
January 1, 1862, and appeared in the Cornhill Mag- 
azine in 1862-63. Mr. Cross notes that she said, 
"I began it a young woman, — I finished it an old 
woman." 

By 1859 the identity of George Eliot, which had 
been remarkably well concealed, was sufficiently known 
for many to seek her in her London home. Mr. Oscar 



GEORGE ELIOT 503 

Browning thus describes the scene : " Mrs. Lewes gen- 
erally sat in an armchair at the left of the fireplace. 
Lewes generally stood or moved about in the back 
drawing-room. ... In the early days of my acquaint- 
ance the company was small, containing more men than 
women. Herbert Spencer and Professor Beesly were 
constant visitors. The guests closed around the fire and 
the conversation was general. At a later period the com- 
pany increased, and those who wished to converse with 
the great authoress whom they had come to visit took 
their seat in turns at the chair by her side. She always 
gave us of her best. Her conversation was deeply sympa- 
thetic, but grave and solemn, illumined by happy phrases 
and by thrilling tenderness, but not by humor. Although 
her features were heavy, and not well proportioned, all 
was forgotten when that majestic head bent slowly down, 
and the eyes were lit up with a penetrating and lively 
gaze. She appeared much greater than her books. Her 
ability seemed to shrink beside her moral grandeur. 
She was not only the cleverest, but the best woman you 
had met. You never dared to speak to her of her works ; 
her personality was so much more impressive than its 
product." 

After Romola there was a pause in George Eliot's 
work. This book seemed to point to a kind of novel 
differing slightly from the earlier productions, Adam 
Bede and The Mill on the Floss, to a new type, at 
last achieved in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. 
Meanwhile, in the transition, she wrote Felix Holt, 
published in 1866, a book which in manner though not 
in success should be classed with Silas Marner. At the 
same time a greater interest in poetic composition was 
growing upon her and resulted in 1868 in the long 



604 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

dramatic poem, The Spanish Gypsy. She had for some 
time considered and worked on this poem and had chosen 
Spain as the fittest scene, just as Florence had been 
suited to Romola. It was with the purpose of studying 
details that she and Mr. Lewes visited Spain early in 
1867. These days seem to have been among her hap- 
piest ; her letters, usually not very interesting reading, 
take on a brighter, less self-analytic turn. Instead of 
questions as to her usefulness in this sad world, she is 
more apt to write such sentences as, " Last night we 
walked out and saw the towers of the Alhambra, the wide 
Vega, and the snowy mountains by the brilliant moon- 
light." 

Soon after, however, depression returned. The sad 
sickness and slow death in 1869 of young Thornton 
Lewes, whom she nursed, made a strong impression on 
her sensitive nature. " This death," she wrote, " seems 
to me the beginning of our own." Middlemarch, too, 
by this time well under way, brought the same travail 
as Romola. " When a subject has begun to grow in 
me," she said, " I suffer terribly until it has wrought 
itself out — become a complete organism ; and then it 
seems to take wing and go away from me. That thing 
is not to be done again, — that life has been lived." 
During the pauses in the writing of Middlemarch she 
composed more poetry, which, including Jubal and other 
poems, was published in 1874. Middlemarch began 
coming out in eight bi-monthly parts on December 1, 
1871, under the title Miss Brooke, and was finished in 
September, 1872. It was immensely successful ; nearly 
20,000 copies sold by the end of 1874. 

Though conceived almost as early as Middlemarch, 
Daniel Deronda, which is in the estimation of some 



GEORGE ELIOT 505 

her greatest work, did not appear till 1876. The com- 
position of it caused her the same anxiety, — the "fear 
lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a 
contribution to literature, and not a mere addition to the 
heap of books," — but she was comforted on looking 
back to see " that I really was in worse health and 
suffered equal depression about Romola ; and, so far as 
I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of 
Middlemarch.''^ Her interest in the Jews, an interest 
especially revealed in this book, had been growing for 
some time and was enough to stimulate her manner of 
moralizing which so many deplore. People "hardly 
know," she wrote to Mrs. Stowe, " that Christ was a 
Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ 
spoke Greek. . . . The best that can be said of it is, 
that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness — in plain 
English, the stupidity — which is still the average mark 
of our culture." The English people were being indeed 
scourged at all hands ; for the genial Dickens was dead, 
and if they turned from George Eliot, they were like 
to encounter Ruskin, now grown shrill, or Carlyle, vio- 
lent with his anathemas. 

On November 28, 1878, George Lewes died, leaving 
her almost inconsolable. One of the first things she 
did, on collecting herself, was to arrange for a Cam- 
bridge " studentship " endowed in his name. The Im- 
pressions of Theophrastus Such, her last work, was 
published the following year. Not long after. May 6, 
1880, she married her subsequent biographer, Mr. John 
Cross. "No one," says Mr. Oscar Browning, "can have 
studied the character of George Eliot, even superficially, 
without being convinced how necessary it was for her 
to have some one to depend upon, and how much her na- 



506 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ture yearned for sympathy and support." But she did 
not live long to enjoy the world which she now found 
" so intensely interesting." She died, after a short 
attack of throat trouble, " something like croup," on 
December 22, 1880, and was buried beside Mr. Lewes 
in Highgate Cemetery. 



ALFRED TENNYSON 

As the nineteenth century recedes, and so comes more 
and more into view as a whole, so much greater seems 
the likelihood that Tennyson will always be regarded as 
its representative poet in English literature. He was 
born in its first decade, and died in its last. He came 
of age during the agitation for the great Reform Bill, 
echoed the hopes of ardent Liberals who were fain to 
press on with the good cause, — 

" Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were 
furl'd 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World ; " 

but lived to share a growing distrust in democracy, to 
sneer at " the suffrage of the plow," and to say — 

"Let us hush this cry of 'Forward! ' till ten thousand years have 
gone." 

He was precisely fifty years old when Darwin's book on 
the Origin of Species appeared, marking a revolution 
in man's thought ; but he had shared the doubts and 
dissensions which preceded Darwin's summary, and in 
his In Memoriam grajjples hard with the many difficul- 
ties which attended the meeting of a new science and 
an ancient faith. In poetry he could remember Byron 
as a living voice, and records the grief with which on 
an April day in 1824, "a day when the whole world 
seemed to be darkened for me," he went out and carved 
on a rock the words " Byron is dead." When the world 
recorded the poet's own death, he had outlived all but 



508 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

one of the great singers of the century, and left only 
Swinburne to hand down the traditions of our nobler 
verse. Unlike Browning, he was popular with all classes 
of readers, yet he kept intact the dignity and distinc- 
tion of his own personal art. Unlike Browning, too, he 
shunned society ; his love of nature was as genuine as 
it was profound ; and all his portraits show the face of 
an artist and a dreamer. Clearly, then, he must be ac- 
cepted as the representative poet of his nation and of 
his time. 

Alfred Tennyson was born at Somersby in Lincoln- 
shire, August 6, 1809, the fourth of twelve children. 
His father was rector of the parish, and belonged to a 
very old family of that country. The mother, born Eliza- 
beth Fytche, was also of ancient descent. His native 
country is described in many poems ; we are told that 
the stream which flowed through Somersby is addressed 
in that charming lyric Flow down, Cold Rivulet, to the 
Sea. At seven he was sent to school in Louth, and 
went through the common experience of that day, — 
copious floggings from the master and still more copious 
cuffings from the boys. " How I did hate that school !" 
was his comment in later life. After four years he re- 
turned to Somersby and was taught by his father, a 
man of great ability and varied tastes, until he was 
ready for Cambridge. Juvenile poems of this period 
show uncommon ability compared with most effusions 
of the kind ; and when he was but sixteen years of age 
he was engaged on verse which was published two years 
later along with that of his elder brother Charles, as 
Poems hy Two Brothers. Some of these Jiwenilia are 
now included in the poet's collected works. 

In February, 1828, the two brothers entered Trinity 



ALFRED TENNYSON 509 

College, Cambridge, whither their older brother Fred- 
erick had preceded them. Alfred is described in these 
days as striking and distinguished in appearance. His son 
and biographer quotes the following : " Six feet high, 
broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearean, 
with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark 
wavy hair, his head finely poised, his hand the admira- 
tion of sculptors, long fingers with square tips, soft as 
a child's, but of great size and strength. What struck 
one most about him was the union of strength with re- 
finement." The two brothers lived in lodgings, and so 
missed the more intimate college life ; but they made 
friends among the best men of the University. Nearest 
and dearest of these to the poet was Arthur Henry Hal- 
lam, a man of great attainments and promise, whose 
early death called out the In Memoriam. Other friends 
were Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton ; 
Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin ; Thompson, 
subsequently Master of Trinity ; Maurice, celebrated as a 
great liberal preacher; Spedding, the editor of Bacon. 
In the formal debates of their society Tennyson took 
little part and is said never to have read a paper be- 
fore them, but his conversation was brilliant enough in 
that 

" band 
Of youthful friends, on mind and art, 
And labour, and the changing mart, 
And all the framework of the land." 

This society went by the name of " The Apostles." In 
1829 Tennyson won the prize medal in poetry on the 
subject of Timbuctoo. He was too shy to declaim the 
poem at Commencement, and that part of the task was 
performed by his friend Merivale; but in the presence 



610 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

of a few friends Tennyson was already famous for his 
noble and sympathetic recitation of poetry, declaiming 
one of his own poems or a ballad like Clerh Saunders. 
In 1830, while he was still an undergraduate, was pub- 
lished his first volume, Poems^ Chiefly Lyrical. The 
reviews were fairly encouraging ; and though there was 
an affectation, a kind of overdone daintiness, in these 
early verses, about which Tennyson heard and was yet 
to hear much sarcasm from The Quarterly Review 
and Blackwood's Magazine, there were many discrimi- 
nating readers who hailed him as the coming poet of 
England. Another break in the even course of college 
life was Tennyson's departure for Spain with Arthur 
Hallam for the purpose of giving financial help to 
the revolutionists who had risen against Kmg Ferdi- 
nand and the Inquisition. This romantic expedition, in 
which the two friends conferred with leaders of the re- 
volt, left a permanent impression on Tennyson's mind 
of the splendid scenery of the Pyrenees. He was par- 
ticularly moved by the beauty of the streams and water- 
falls. " Somehow," he said in after life, " water is the 
element I love best of all the four." In the valley of 
Cauteretz, his son tells us, he then wrote part of his 
(Enone, which is full of that wild scenery, and thirty- 
two years later the music of its stream still echoed in 
the lines beginning " All along the valley," and recalled 
the man he loved, the comrade of his wanderings. 

He left Cambridge in February, 1831, without tak- 
ing a degree. Shortly afterward his father died ; but 
by an arrangement with the new rector the family kept 
their home for six years. Meanwhile, Arthur Hallam 
had become engaged to Tennyson's sister, and made 
frequent visits to the rectory. The poet lived quietly at 



ALFRED TENNYSON 611 

home, took long walks, read, studied, and made a few 
contributions to magazines and annuals. For two years 
his intercourse with Hallam was constant, now in Lin- 
colnshire and now at Hallam's house in London, where 
much tobacco was smoked and discussion ranged from 
the exciting events of the day — -all England was in 
the throes of the Reform agitation — to the ideals of 
poet and philosopher. The poems of Tennyson's new col- 
lection were circulated in manuscript among his friends 
and duly appreciated. The volume itself appeared at 
the close of the year 1832. Here was the real Tennyson. 
The public now could read The Lady of Shalott, The 
Miller's Daughter^ (Enone^ The Palace of Art, The 
May Queen, The Lotos-Eaters, and the Dream of Fair 
Women. Here was indeed richness, but the great re- 
views thought otherwise. The Quarterly made a savage 
and clumsy attack. Tennyson had laid himself open to 
ridicule by the ineffectual and almost fatuous lines to 
his " darling room ; " and the reviewer paid his compli- 
ments to the supposed " white dimity " of the couches in 
the dear little room as "a type of the purity of the 
poet's mind." Thirteen years later, when Tennyson re- 
ceived his pension from the government, Bulwer, in a 
poem called the New Timon, could still mock School- 
miss Alfred and — 

" her chaste delight 
In darling little rooms so warm and bright." 

Tennyson's reply in Punch, in which he called Bulwer 
a " bandbox," was a perhaps regrettable but sufficiently 
energetic blow in return. But in 1832 all the praise 
of his friends could not nerve the poet to brave the 
thunders of the mighty Quarterly, and his son says 
that had it not been for the intervention of these same 



513 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

friends, Tennyson would have ceased to write, after the 
death of Arthur Hallam. 

That this irreparable loss should deepen the poet's 
lack of confidence in his literary fortunes was natural. 
He had hardly received an enthusiastic letter from Hal- 
lain about pictures in Vienna when news came of his 
friend's sudden death in September, 1833. His grief 
found expression in several poems, none of which is 
more profoundly affecting than the simple lines begin- 
ning "Break, break, break ! " But a series of " elegies " 
composed in a metre little used up to that time, which 
he began in 1833 in the first flood of sorrow, was con- 
tinued, elaborated, and revised as the years went on, 
and finally appeared in May, 1850, in a limited edition, 
as In Memoriam. It was published soon after without 
the author's name, but was of course attributed at once 
to Tennyson, who in that year, by the death of Words- 
worth, became the foremost living poet of England. 

Tennyson's life from 1832 to 1842 is now difficult 
to follow. He wrote few letters, and his movements are 
traced chiefly from the notes and recollections of his 
friends. In 1837 the Tennysons had moved to Epping 
Forest, and again in 1840 to Tunbridge Wells. In 1835 
the poet and Edward FitzGerald were in the Lake Coun- 
try together with James Spedding, and Tennyson read 
to his friends such poems as Morte d' Arthur^ The Day- 
Dream^ and The Gardener' s Daughter. It is a delight- 
ful glimpse that FitzGerald gives us of himself and 
Tennyson resting on their oars in a boat on Windermere 
while Alfred quotes his lines about the lady of the lake 
and Excalibur : — 

" Nine years she wrought it, sitting in the deeps 
Upon the hidden bases of the hills." 



ALFRED TENNYSON 513 

"Not iDad, that, Fitz, is it?" was the poet's comment. 
He called on Hartley Coleridge, who wrote a sonnet on 
the occasion, and whom Tennyson afterwards described 
as " a loveable little fellow ; " but the shy young bard 
could not be persuaded to visit Wordsworth at Rydal 
Mount. In brief, during these years Tennyson was per- 
fecting his art, pondering over the burning political 
questions, and over problems of metaphysics and re- 
ligion now particularly significant to him through the 
death of Hallam, communing with his gifted friends, 
and corresponding with Miss Emily Sellwood, who was 
later to be his wife. Her older sister Louisa was married 
in 1836 to Tennyson's brother Charles ; and she had 
met the poet as early as 1830, "a beautiful girl of seven- 
teen, in her simple gray dress," in a forest walk, getting 
from him the somewhat startling question, " Are you 
a Dryad or an Oread wandering here ? " In 1837 Tenny- 
son began his friendship with Gladstone ; and from this 
time on, under the spur of his engagement to Emily 
Sellwood, and with an inward assurance of success, he 
seems to have put most of his doubts and difficulties and 
morbidness behind him, and bent all his energies upon 
the completion of his new volume of verse. It is true 
that his poverty and meagre prospects caused all cor- 
respondence with Miss Sellwood to be forbidden, and 
the marriage did not take place until June, 1850; but 
the deeper engagement was unbroken, and the consola- 
tions of friendship and of his art sustained Tennyson 
through this period of struggle. In October, 1841, 
John Sterling writes : " Carlyle was here yesterday 
evening, growled at having missed you, and said more 
in your praise than in anyone's except Cromwell, and 
an American backwoodsman who has killed thirty or 



614 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

forty people with a bowie-knife and since run away to 
Texas." 

The new collection appeared in 1842. Tennyson now 
lived part of the time in London, dining at the Cock, 
whose head-waiter he celebrated in the famous verses, 
and meeting, besides his old friends, Thackeray, Carlyle, 
Rogers, Dickens, Landor, Leigh Hunt, and Campbell. 
These social occasions alternated with sohtudes; and 
Carlyle describes him in a letter to Emerson " dwelling 
in an element of gloom, carrying a bit of chaos about 
him, in short, which he is manufacturing into cosmos." 
The description which follows is famous : " One of the 
finest looking men in the world. A great shock of rough 
dusky dark hair ; bright laughing hazel eyes ; massive 
aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate ; of sallow 
brown complexion, almost Indian looking, clothes cyni- 
cally loose, free-and-easy, smokes infinite tobacco. His 
voice is musical, metallic, fit for loud laughter and 
piercing wail, and all that may lie between ; speech and 
speculation free and plenteous; I do not meet in these 
late decades such company over a pipe! We shall see 
what he will grow to." With the appearance of the 
poems of 1842, which were brought out by Edward 
Moxon in two small volumes and were in their fourth 
edition by 1846, Tennyson's success was assured. There 
was what his son caUs a " chorus of favorable re- 
views." Many of the poems became like household words 
on both sides of the ocean, and while Tlie Lord of 
Burleigh appealed to the humblest minds, there were 
Ulysses and Morte d' Arthur^ Sir Galahad and The 
Vision of Sin for a higher mood. It is said that a part 
of Ulysses remained Tennyson's own favorite. At the 
age of thirty-three, then, Tennyson had really taken by 



ALFRED TENNYSON 515 

storm the heart o£ the public. The new poems and 
the old favorites now revised made up a body of verse 
individual in character, exquisite in form, and as dis- 
tinctly human and sincere in their lyric quality as the 
best poems of Wordsworth. Indeed, FitzGerald, who 
was as jealous a critic as he was an ardent admirer of 
the poet's work, always maintained that Tennyson's 
best work was done at this time. 

The prosperous years, however, had not yet begun. 
In 1844 Tennyson's health was seriously impaired. He 
had sold his small estate in Lincolnshire, and with the 
money thus realized, together with a legacy of X500, 
had gone into a scheme of wood-carving by machinery 
undertaken by an enthusiastic neighbor. The project 
failed utterly; and with Tennyson's own money went 
" a portion of the property of his brothers and sisters. 
So severe a hypochondria set in upon him," says his 
son, " that his friends despaired of his life." He tried 
a hydropathic cure, wrote little or nothing to any one 
and was at the lowest ebb of fortune and spirits. Mean- 
while his friends were not idle. Carlyle, using his 
weapon of words, and Milnes, marshaling the more 
effective ranks of political influence, persuaded Sir 
Kobert Peel in 1845 to grant the poet an annual pen- 
sion of £200. It is said that the minister was balancing 
the rival claims of Tennyson and an older and more 
obscure poet, Knowles, when Milnes read him Ulysses 
and decided the question outright. In 1846 Tennyson 
went abroad, and the next year was stiU taking his 
hydropathic treatment and neglecting his friends. But 
this same year, 1847, saw the publication of The 
Princess, In the opinion of friends like Carlyle and 
FitzGerald it was a grievous lapse. The poem, to be 



516 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

sure, was what it called itself, a medley ; it attacked 
the great question of woman's rights, a question which 
few Englishmen then took seriously, and solved it with 
those famous lines which assert that " woman is not 
undeveloped man, but diverse," and define her rights 
as based on an equality which is " not like to like, but 
like in difference." Along with this moral runs a ro- 
mantic adventurous tale, and scattered through the 
whole are some of Tennyson's most exquisite lyrics, 
notably the " Bugle Song," inspired by his visit to the 
Lakes of Killarney. 

In 1850 Tennyson, who had been living the past four 
years at Cheltenham, published In Memoriam. Doubt- 
fully received at first, this poem, which reflects so faith- 
fully the troubled intellectual condition of the times, 
beginning with personal grief, and then passing into a 
series of lyrics on life and death, on faith and despair, 
and ending with a sort of epithalamium on the marriage 
of the poet's sister, found a sympathetic audience in 
the best minds of the day. One of the most appreciative 
reviews was from the pen of Gladstone, who had been 
the intimate school friend of Arthur Hallam. Even the 
publisher predicted financial success, and on the strength 
of this expectation, along with his pension, Tennyson 
and Miss Sellwood were married, June 13, 1850, at 
Shiplake on the Thames. Moreover, what the world 
would regard as the most important result of this pub- 
lication was the admiration felt for the poem by Prince 
Albert, and the consequent appointment as Poet Laure- 
ate. Wordsworth had died a few months before, and 
after a formal offer of the post to Sogers, who declined 
it on account of his great age, it was bestowed upon Ten- 
nyson in November. Apart from the great honor of this 



ALFRED TENNYSON 517 

post, the recipient must have appreciated its commercial 
importance. He had been a poor and struggling man, 
but from this date the sales of his books grew rap- 
idly; his arrangements were shrewdly made, and the 
material success of his career is attested by his com- 
fortable home at Farringford in the Isle of Wight, 
the stately house which he afterwards built in Surrey, 
and the income which permitted him to accept a peer- 
age. 

After the death of their first child the Tennysons 
made a tour in Italy, and the poet records the impres- 
sions of that journey in a poem called The Daisy. The 
books he took with him were " his usual traveling 
companions, Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Hor- 
ace, Pindar, Theocritus," and probably Dante's Divine 
Comedy, and the poems of Goethe. In Paris they met 
the Brownings. In August, 1852, Hallam Tennyson 
was born ; the poet's letters breathe a spirit of domestic 
happiness, which was to be uninterrupted, save by the 
death of their second son, for forty years. The next 
year he leased the house at Farringford with the option 
of buying it ; and here, close to the sea that he loved, 
with the great downs near him for his solitary walks, 
and groves of elm and chestnut and pine at his very 
door, he wrote the most romantic and melodious of his 
poems. Maud, like The Princess, failed at first of 
hearty and general applause. Gladstone afterwards ad- 
mitted that he had misunderstood it, and only caught 
the real meaning of the poem when he heard Tenny- 
son read it aloud. But the Brownings were enthusiastic 
from the first, and piiblic taste came in time to recog- 
nize its merits. The lyrical passages were prime favor- 
ites with their author, whose wonderful voice was never 



618 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

SO sympathetic as wlien he read the passage beginning, 
" O that 't were possible," or the long, tremulous, ex- 
ultant lines, " I have led her home, my love, my only 
friend." But the great public did not take time to dis- 
cover the beauties of this " monodramatic lyric;" they 
read rather passages bearing upon the all-absorbing sub- 
ject of the Crimean War, and blamed the author for 
attacking John Bright as the man "whose ears are 
stuffed with cotton and ring even in dreams to the 
chink of his pence," and worse, as a " huckster who 
would put down war." One man actually thought that 
Mr. Layard was the Assyrian Bull of the poem, while 
Tennyson's own aunt imagined that Maud contained a 
dastardly attack on the owners of coal mines. One Dr. 
Mann came out with a " vindication," for which he got 
hearty thanks from the poet. What the public did like, 
however, unreservedly and permanently, was a poem 
published in the same volume with Maud, but first 
printed in The Examiner for December 9, 1854, The 
Charge of the Light Brigade ; and also the memorial 
ode on the Duke of Wellington, which had been printed 
separately in 1852. The larger volume appeared not 
only with the title of Poet Laureate, but with the de- 
gree of D. C. L. attached to the author's name. He 
had received the doctorate at the Oxford commemoration 
in June. He was nervous before the ordeal, and said 
that the shouts of the students were like the cry of the 
Roman crowd to " fling the Christians to the lions." 
His son and biographer properly records the great 
ovation which the poet received, — the shouts of " In 
Memoriam ! " and the applause, but does not tell how 
students in the gallery called out such questions as " Did 
they wake and call you early, call you early, Alfred 



ALFRED TENNYSON 519 

dear?" and other kindly jests recorded by those who 
saw and heard. 

Farringford was finally purchased in the spring of 
1856, " with the proceeds of the sale of Maud." Here 
Tennyson worked on his Idylls of the King., watched 
with careful eye the life and the growth of nature 
about him, making many a note, as was his wont, that 
afterwards appeared as a striking metaphor or simile 
in verse, translated the Odyssey aloud to Mrs. Tenny- 
son in the winter evenings, walked and talked with his 
children. Visitors sought him out, now Bayard Tay- 
lor, who has left a sympathetic account of his visit, 
noting particularly Tennyson's minute knowledge of 
botany and geology, and now the Prince Consort, who 
took back a bunch of cowslips for the Queen. In 1858 
the poet records a visit from " young Swinburne," whom 
he thought " a very modest and intelligent young fel- 
low." Tyndall and Newman were also pilgrims ; while 
the Carlyles, the Brownings, Jowett, Kuskin, and 
Thackeray were frequent correspondents. To the last- 
named he is " my dear old Alfred." In 1859 appeared 
the Idylls of the King. As the Duke of Argyll wrote 
the author, detractors were silenced and applause went 
on crescendo. Macaulay, Gladstone, Clough, Ruskin, his 
tried old friend Aubrey de Vere, who speaks of these 
"glorious chivalrous legends," and even that prosaic 
person Walter, the proprietor of the Times, were full 
of enthusiasm. Prince Albert, in an admiring letter, 
asked for the poet's name to be written in the royal 
copy ; in short, the success of the Idylls was overwhelm- 
ing and the poet was requested to continue the epic. 
In 1862 Tennyson, who was in high favor at court, 
and had dedicated his Idylls to the memory of her late 



520 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

Consort, paid his first visit to the Queen. " There was 
a kind of stately innocence about her," he reports ; and 
she told him that, next to the Bible, In Memoriam was 
her comfort. In 1863 he writes his official but hearty 
welcome to Alexandra, the new Princess of Wales. In 
the midst of all this visiting and correspondence with 
dukes and princesses and great ladies of the court, it is 
pleasant to read the letter in which Tennyson congrat- 
ulates Swinburne on his Atalanta in Calydon; it is long, 
he says, since he has read anything so fine. The poem 
has both " strength and splendor," and shows, adds the 
elder poet, "a fine metrical invention which I envy 

you." 

In 1864 appeared Enoch Arden. It was deservedly 
and immediately popular, and Sir Alfred Lyall says 
that it has been dramatized in London and New York, 
translated into Latin and into seven modern lansruajres, 
seven distinct translations being made in France alone. 
In the same volume with Enoch Arden, of which sixty 
thousand copies were almost immediately sold, was a 
poem in dialect, then a rare experiment in English 
poetry, which must count among Tennyson's successes. 
In The Northern Farmer is heard the voice of that 
sturdy breed that Tennyson knew so well, combined 
with genuine pathos and humor. 

Marked mainly by increase of fortune and fame, 
Tennyson's life moved on these pleasant lines for many 
years. Honors were showered upon him and visitors high 
and low sought him out, though his shyness and dis- 
like of conspicuous positions was always asserting itseK, 
as many an anecdote could testify. A pleasant glimpse 
of him is at Marlborough school, whither he had taken 
his older son Hallam, reading Guinevere to the Upper 



ALFRED TENNYSON 521 

Sixth after dinner. The Holy Grail was published in 
1869, and he continued his Idylls of the King. In 1875 
the public was surprised by a new phase of the poet's 
art in Queen Mary, the first of his dramas. More than 
this, he intended his plays to be acted, and whatever 
may be thought of his dramatic success, there is some- 
thing admirable in the vigor with which a man of sixty- 
five turned to labor in a new field. Queen Mary was 
played by Irving and his company, and Browning af- 
firmed the first night to be a complete triumph. Harold 
and Becket soon followed. The latter, refused by Irving 
in 1879, was staged a dozen years later, and the actor in 
1893 records the fiftieth performance in the "hey-day of 
success." In 1882, however, a very disagreeable incident 
had occurred. The Promise of May, a kind of village 
tragedy, was misunderstood by the public and very 
roughly handled. " In the middle of one of the perform- 
ances Lord Queensberry rose, and in the name of Free 
Thought protested against ' Mr. Tennyson's abominable 
caricature.' " Even more noteworthy than these dra- 
matic ventures was the vigor of production which Tenny- 
son showed in the baUads and occasional pieces of his 
old age. Some of his best known poems appeared in 
the volume dedicated to his grandson by one who had 
passed his threescore and ten. Here were the swing 
and noble sentiment of The Revenge^ The Defence of 
LucTcnow, The Voyage of Maeldune, and the spirited 
rendering of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Brunanhurh. 
Almost to the end this vigor of production asserted it- 
self. Probably none of his shorter poems will be re- 
membered longer than Crossing the Bar, which was 
written in his eighty-first year and came, as he said to 
his son, " in a moment ;" it is rightly called the crown 



522 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

of the poet's life-work. A few days before his death he 
requested that Crossing the Bar should be put at the 
end of all editions of his poems. 

As early as 1868 he had begun to build his stately 
house at Aldworth in Surrey, and henceforth had two 
homes. He was wont to stay at Farringford until the 
early summer, and then went to Aldworth, where he 
got relief from his hay fever and enjoyed his country 
walks. If on these rambles, we are told, " a tourist were 
seen coming towards him, he would flee." Gladstone 
had proposed a baronetcy to him, but it was declined. 
In 1874 Disraeli again pressed this honor upon him, 
and Tennyson again declined it, but proposed that it 
should be kept in a kind of storage for his son. This, 
of course, was impossible. In the fall of 1883, however, 
Tennyson made a voyage with Gladstone on the Pem- 
broke Castle as far as Norway, getting a particularly 
warm welcome at Copenhagen, where, in the small 
smoking-room of the steamer, the poet read his " Bugle 
Song " and The Grandmother to the crowned heads of 
Russia and Denmark and the Princess of Wales. Dur- 
ing the whole journey Gladstone and Tennyson had 
infinite talk on poetry and philosophy. One day the 
former proposed to Hallam Tennyson that his father 
should accept a peerage ; the matter was mentioned to 
Tennyson, and statesman and poet discussed it without 
result. The upshot may be given in Tennyson's own 
woi-ds : " By Gladstone's advice I have consented to 
take the peerage, but for my own part I shall regret 
my simple name aU my life." In 1884 he took his seat 
in the House of Lords as Baron Tennyson. 

Meanwhile he was paying the invariable penalties of 
old age. His friend FitzGerald had died in the preceding 



ALFRED TENNYSON 523 

year, and to the poet life seemed scarce worth living 
out, — 

" Remembering all the golden hours 

Now silent, and so many dead, 

And him the last." 

In 1886 his second son, Lionel, died on the homeward 
voyage from India, and was buried at sea. In 1888 he 
suffered a serious attack of illness, but recovered and 
was again working on a new volume of poems when he 
was shocked by the news of Browning's death, in De- 
cember, 1889. In 1892 it was noted that for the first 
time Tennyson's voice failed while he was reading his 
Lotos-Eaters aloud. At the end of June he left Far- 
ringford for Aldworth, and for a while was able to take 
his regular walks, but soon he was confined to his gar- 
den, and rested in a summer-house sheltered from the 
wind. In July he visited London for the last time. 
Late in September his illness took its fatal turn. As 
the end approached he called repeatedly for his Shake- 
speare. Early on the morning of October the 6 th he 
passed quietly away. Cymbeline, one of his favorite 
plays, was placed with him in his coffin ; and on the 
12th, with stately funeral ceremonies, he was buried 
in Westminster Abbey, not far from his friend and 
generous rival, Eobert Browning. 



ROBERT BROWNING 

Vitality, versatility, intellectual curiosity — these 
were the most obvious characteristics in Browning's 
life. "Since Chaucer was alive and hale," wrote Lan- 
dor of him in 1846, — 

** No man has walked along our roads with step 
So active, so enquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse." 

Yet in the external aspects of his life there was nothing 
sensational. Born in a quiet, conventional atmosphere, 
he lived and died conventional. In religion a dissenter, 
he was a conformist in little matters of daily life ; he 
hated eccentricity. The same eager spirit, however, 
which in another age would have discovered Guiana or 
caught the fire of the French Revolution inspired him. 
By his energy and grasp of realities he outran most of 
his contemporaries in discovering and expressing the 
catholic, inquiring spirit of his time. His interest in 
the life about him was unflagging ; all through his long 
experience he pursued untiringly his ideal, and to the 
end he bore his burden with an exuberant enthusiasm. 
Browning's parents were Robert Browning and Sarah 
Anne Wiedemann. Camberwell, where they lived, was 
then on the outskirts of London, and surrounded by 
fairly open country, and there, on May 7, 1812, their 
first child, Robert, was born. His father had succeeded 
the grandfather Browning in a respectable position in 
the Bank of England, but he had, unlike his practical, 
somewhat stern parent, gone unwillingly into banking, 



ROBERT BROWNING 525 

with the result that he never attained the business suc- 
cess of his predecessor. In fact, his interests lay increas- 
ingly among his books, for the most part curious old 
volumes which he had bound with blank leaves at the 
end to contain the notes he liked to make. He remem- 
bered, moreover, the strait jacket of his own youth, and 
when he saw inclination leading his growing son to 
other places than the Bank of England, he gave the boy 
a free rein. To this father, a man full of interesting 
and accurate information, a man whose reticence and 
modesty shut him off from the prominence he deserved, 
Browning owed most of his education. As a non-con- 
formist the father was, of course, unable to give his son 
the customary public school and university career. In- 
deed, except for four years (1822-26) in a Mr. Ready's 
school, occasional lessons from a private tutor, and a 
few months at London University, all of Browning's 
youthful training came from his father or from om- 
nivorous reading in his father's library. 

In his mother, too. Browning was fortunate. From 
her he inherited a love of music and a religious in- 
spiration, but, most of aU, a spontaneous and striking 
tenderness. From her also must have come, with the 
quick sensibilities that awakened the poet in him, what 
little physical weakness he had. It is common to speak 
of Browning as robust ; intellectually robust he was, 
and, as men go, he was possessed of more than average 
physical robustness. He never knew, as did his wife, 
for instance, what prolonged sickness or great fatigue 
meant, — he suffered little ; but the idea that his good 
health was remarkable is erroneous and probably the 
result of his own optimistic retrospect. His early letters 
to Miss Barrett speak often of headache — a thing 



526 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

which his scrupulous modesty would have forbidden had 
there been no cause. During the first days at Florence 
his wife nursed him through sleepless nights, and in 
later life he was attacked by severe colds. That he 
rarely allowed sickness to interfere with his active life 
does not bear witness so much to his good health as to 
his unfailingly good spirits, a much more important 
thing to remember. 

From the first Browning felt an intense interest in 
hfe. As a boy he always kept many pets — mice, snakes, 
monkeys, hedgehogs, owls, and an eagle. Among his 
earliest pets were two lady-birds, which he brought home, 
put in a box lined with cotton, and labeled, " Animals 
found surviving in the depths of a severe winter." 

In poetry he began early. His sister Sariana re- 
membered him toddling around the dining-room table, 
and telling off the scansion of verses with his fingers. 
When he was twelve years old he had written enough 
verses for a volume. These he. showed to the Misses 
Flower, the elder of whom thought them so remark- 
able that she made a copy which she sent to the Rev. 
William J. Fox, a Unitarian clergyman of considerable 
reputation as a political and critical writer. He thought 
the verses too juvenile for publication, but he prophesied 
great things of the author. When these verses were 
written Browning was entirely under the influence of 
Byron, but the next year he passed to a deeper, more 
lasting influence, that of Shelley. At that time the 
works of Shelley were not widely known, but Brown- 
ing's mother at last found copies at a shop in Vere 
Street ; besides the works of Shelley she returned with 
three volumes written by a " Mr. John Keats," — all 
but The Cenci in first editions. Browning devoured 



ROBERT BROWNING 527 

them eagerly, and tells how two nightingales sang, one 
in a laburnum, the other in a copper beech, the spirit 
of the poets' verse. 

Still under the Shelley influence he produced, at 
twenty-one, Pauline^ his first publication. The poem, 
brought out anonymously, met with almost no success ; 
Browning himself soon grew to consider it as youthful 
incompetence and would not, until his later fame ren- 
dered it a curiosity, suffer it to be included among his 
works. Yet D. G. Rossetti, twenty years later, thought 
it of sufficient merit, on running across a copy in the 
British Musemn, to transcribe the whole, and when he 
met the author of it he told him it might have been 
written by Browning himself. 

By this time, 1833, Browning had definitely chosen 
the vocation of poet. This interest appears in his 
friendship with Alfred Domett, to whom, on the latter's 
setting out for New Zealand, he wrote his poem of 
Waring^ and with whom he kept in close correspond- 
ence for some years. Soon after the publication of 
Pauline, he spent a short time traveling in Russia and 
half-seriously considered diplomacy as a calling ; but 
after a stay of some months he was back in London at 
his poetry. Mr. Fox, who had reviewed Pauline favor- 
ably in the Monthly Repository, got Browning to con- 
tribute, in 1834, four lyrics, — "Johannes Agrieola in 
Meditation " and " Porphyria's Lover," later published 
in Men and Women ; the song, " A King lived Long 
Ago," later included in Pippa Passes; and the son- 
net beginning, " Eyes calm beside thee." The follow- 
ing March (1835) came out Browning's first great 
achievement, the dramatic poem, Paracelsus. 

Paracelsus, though it was not any greater success 



528 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

with the world at large than Pauline had been, gained 
the poet recognition in literary circles. He met among 
others R. H. Home, Leigh Hunt, Carlyle, Bryan 
Waller Procter, Monckton Milnes, and T. N. Talfourd. 
Especially eventful was the acquaintance with William 
Macready, the actor, and his friend John Forster, the 
critic. Macready, who was first met one evening, No- 
vember 27, 1835, at the Rev. Mr. Fox's, was much 
pleased with the slender, handsome poet and noted in his 
diary that his " face was full of intelligence." The fol- 
lowing New Year's Eve Browning met Forster at Mac- 
ready's place at Elstree. Forster had written in the Ex- 
aminer one of the few favorable reviews of Paracelsus^ 
and the friendship was cemented at once. The next 
spring Browning attended at Talfourd' s a dinner more 
significant in his life even than the "immortal din- 
ner" Haydon gave to Keats, Lamb, and Wordsworth. 
Macready had just risen into fame ; after a long fight 
in the law courts with Bunn, the manager of Drury 
Lane, and incidentally with the person of Bunn in 
that worthy's office, he had been transferred to Cov- 
ent Garden, where he was first associated with Miss 
Helen Faucit, the brilliant actress ; Talfourd's 'Ion had 
just been produced with great success ; and now on 
the author's birthday. May 26, there was celebration 
at Talfourd's. Macready sat between Wordsworth and 
Landor, with Browning opposite ; others of the com- 
pany were Forster and Miss Mitford. The host proposed 
the toast of the English poets and, in spite of Words- 
worth's presence, called on " the youngest of our poets " 
for a response ; and Browning, although public speak- 
ing even in later life caused him positive dread, an- 
swered with "grace and modesty." As the party left the 



ROBERT BROWNING 529 

house, Macready, who was in financial trouble, said to 
Browning, " Write me a play and keep me from going 
to America." Immediately the poet replied, " What do 
you say to Strafford V By the next March the play 
was finished and, thanks to the excellent acting of 
Macready and Miss Faucit, was made, in spite of a 
"positively nauseous" Pym and "whimpering school- 
boy" Vane, a complete success. 

Thus was begun Browning's connection with the 
stage, to end unfortunately a few years later in a 
quarrel over A Blot in the ''Scutcheon. By 1842 Mac- 
ready was still a financial uncertainty. He had de- 
veloped, however, a feeling that he was necessary to the 
success of any piece, yet at the same time an apprehen- 
sion lest he should accept a play which might not make 
a hit. But he did, in the spring of 1842, accept A Blot 
in the ''Scutcheon for his next season. In the fall, at 
Drury Lane, however, he met with considerable loss, 
and, hoping that Browning would withdraw the play, 
wrote that failure had " smashed his arrangement alto- 
gether," but that he was still prepared to bring out 
the piece if the author wished. Browning did not take 
the hint ; whereupon Macready first made the play 
ridiculous by giving it to a wooden-legged, red-faced 
prompter to read, then, on Browning's remonstrating, 
read it himself with better effect, but next declared 
himself unable to act owing to pressure of manage- 
ment, and gave the part to one Phelps, who seemed at 
first too ill to master it. More than this, Macready at- 
tempted to change the title to The Sisters, and to re- 
write many of the best lines ; but he was thwarted in 
this by the author's taking the manuscript to Moxon, 
the publisher, who in a few hours printed a correct ver- 



530 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

sion, which was placed in the hands of the actors the day 
before the performance. The result was that the play 
was put on the stage without adequate properties or 
rehearsals. Yet in spite of this it met with success ; 
Phelps outdid himself and Miss Faucit again came to 
the rescue. But Browning broke finally with Macready 
and practically with writing for the stage, though Co- 
lombe's Birthday (published in 1844) was played ten 
years later at the Haymarket. 

During these seven years of intimacy with Macready 
the active spirit of Browning was producing other 
work. In 1838 he went alone to Italy, chiefly to study 
for his long poem, Sordello^ which was published in 
1840. From this poem arose much of the talk of 
Browning's obscurity. " There were only two lines in 
it that I understood," said Tennyson, "and they were 
both lies ; they were the opening and closing lines, — 

' Who will may hear Sordello's story told,' 
and 

* Who would has heard Sordello's story told I ' " 

And Carlyle remarked that his wife after reading it was 
unable to discover " whether ' SordeUo ' was a man, or a 
city, or a book." The trip to Italy gave rise to other 
pieces, some of his best, such as Hoio they hrought the 
Good News from Ghent to Aix and the drama Pippa 
Passes. On his outward voyage as the ship neared 
Gibraltar he was carried sick on deck, where he wrote 
the famous little Home Thoughts from the Sea. 

At the suggestion of Moxon the publisher his poems 
were brought out in a series of eight publications, which 
he called Bells and Pomegranates. The first of these 
was Pippa Passes, in 1841. The rest in order were : — 



ROBERT BROWNING 531 

King Victor and King Charles^ a drama (1842). 

Dramatic Lyrics (1842). 

The Return of the Druses, a drama (1843). 

A Blot in the ''Scutcheon, a drama (1843). 

Colomhe's Birthday, a drama (1844). 

Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845). 

Luria and A SouVs Tragedy, both plays (1846). 
In later editions the poems in Nos. Ill and VII were 
considerably changed about and some were put under 
other headings. 

In all these publications Browning attained very 
little fame. One recognition, however, was the begin- 
ning of the most interesting experience of his life — 
an experience which especially reveals his character. 
On returning from a short trip to Italy in 1844 he 
found that the poems of Miss Elizabeth Barrett had 
taken both London and New York by storm; and 
among those poems he read the lines : — 

" Or at times a modern volume, Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted 

idyll, 
Howitt's ballad verse, or Teiyiyson's enchanted reverie, — 
Or from Browning some ' Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down 

the middle, 
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity." 

Browning, who was much touched by the reference, 
one day mentioned his delight to an old friend of the 
Barretts, — John Kenyon, " the Magnificent." Miss 
Barrett had been an invalid ever since a riding acci- 
dent in her youth, but it was still possible to visit her 
by letter, and so Kenyon replied, " Why don't you 
write and tell her so ? " Browning did write : " I love 
your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett ; " and 
thence sprang the interesting correspondence of two 



532 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

years culminating in their marriage. It is pleasant to 
think that this poet's love needs no explanation or 
apology ; the simple story is itself Browning's defense 
and praise. 

On the 25th of May, 1844, the two met face to face. 
A closer intimacy grew up, and the letters, at first 
chiefly given over to literary discussion, became more 
personal. For a moment a slight misunderstanding 
arose. Browning wrote a letter which he regretted, and 
Miss Barrett, who felt that her poor health precluded 
all idea of marriage, feared she had been too " head- 
long ; " she was always so, she said, " precipitously rush- 
ing forward through all manner of nettles and briars 
instead of keeping the path ; . . . tearing open letters, 
and never untying a string, — and expecting everything 
to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick 
as the lightning." Once, long after their marriage, 
when he appeared with his beard shaved off, she de- 
manded that he restore it — " that minute." He did let 
it grow, and it came out white. But it was impossible, 
if the correspondence and visits continued, to shut out 
love between two such persons. There was no doubt, 
moreover, that Miss Barrett's health had vastly im- 
proved during the acquaintance. Browning saw it, and 
once in love, he determined to free her from the pesti- 
lential, sick-room atmosphere of her home. But she 
would do nothing without her father's consent, a thing 
which she knew it was now hopeless to ask. 

Mr. Barrett, in fact, was the worst of domestic ty- 
rants. He fancied he was doing all out of love for his 
daughter when, as a matter of fact, he was merely 
satisfying his now incurable passion for the atmosphere 
of the sick-room. He 'had grown, as Mr. Chesterton 



ROBERT BROWNING 533 

excellently puts it, to live, " like some detestable deca- 
dent poet, upon his daughter's decline." He came, says 
the same writer, and " prayed over her with a kind of 
melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a 
watcher by a death-bed." 

In the autumn of 1845, however, a solution seemed 
at hand. The doctors agreed that she should go abroad. 
Her brothers favored the scheme, and her sister Ara- 
bella was ready to accompany her ; but her father, in 
his misguided, selfish affection, did just what might 
have been expected — he refused. A mild winter was 
fortunately survived by Miss Barrett. The following 
summer, however. Browning decided that there was 
only one course, — to marry secretly and leave for 
Italy. The invahd, too, was quite ready for this depar- 
ture ; she now saw that her father was, at least on this 
one point, incurably mad. Such a step, however, was 
particularly distasteful to a man of Browning's frank 
nature and thorough belief in serious respectability. 
Nothing disgusted liim more than the Bohemian atmo- 
sphere so often associated with poets and artists. Yet 
in this one instance the highest action was obviously to 
break all the principles to which he had so strictly 
adhered. Mr. Chesterton again expresses it forcibly: 
" He had always had the courage to tell the truth, and 
now it was demanded of him to have the greater courage 
to tell a lie, and he told it with perfect cheerfulness 
and lucidity." It is to his great credit that he did not 
go on in unconventionalities, justifying step after step 
by the admirable results of the first break. He re- 
mained sincerely conventional to the end. 

On the 12th of September, 1846, Elizabeth Barrett 
slipped quietly from the house and accompanied Brown- 



534 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

ing to the Church of St. Marylebone, where they were 
married. But the strain of marriage and elopement on the 
same day would be, he realized, too great for his invalid 
wife, so the actual escape was arranged for a week later. 
It is highly characteristic of Browning that he would 
not see his wife during this week ; he could not bring 
himself to ask at the door for Miss Barrett; it had 
been necessary in one great instance to deceive her 
father, but it was intolerable, to his frank nature, to 
carry the deception into every little possibility. So, 
after a week's separation, Mrs. Browning, with her 
maid and faithful dog. Flush, who had the tact not to 
bark, left for the last time her father's house, joined her 
husband, and traveled post-haste to Paris. Mr. Barrett 
never even hinted the possibility of reconciliation. 

The marriage more than justified itself. Under the 
blue skies of Italy Mrs. Browning rapidly recovered 
her strength, and for the remainder of her life en- 
joyed health she had not known since childhood. During 
this time Florence was the main place of residence, 
though visits to other spots — chiefly Pisa, the Bagni 
di Lucca, Venice, Siena, and Rome — were scattered 
through the fifteen years. In the summer of 1851 the 
Brownings revisited England, spent the following win- 
ter in Paris, and returned to England in 1852 and 
again in 1855. Their home in Florence was the Casa 
Guidi, an old house jutting with its terrace into the 
sunny square opposite the Pitti Palace. Here their 
only child, Robert Barrett Browning, was born on the 
9th of March, 1849. 

In Mrs. Browning's letters to her friends we catch 
glimpses of a very happy life ; a selection will give the 
general atmosphere : "We drive day by day through 



ROBERT BROWNING 535 

the lovely Cascine, just sweeping through the city. Just 
such a window where Bianca Capello looked out to see 
the Duke go by — and just such a door where Tasso 
stood and where Dante drew his chair out to sit. 
Strange to have all that old world life about us, and 
the blue sky so bright." All readers of Browning know 
from many poems how he felt and remember the pic- 
ture of his wife in By the Fireside, — 

" that great brow 
And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
Mutely, my heart knows how ! " 

In all things, indeed, save a little difference of opinion 
about Spiritualism, of which Browning was stoutly 
incredulous, the poet and his wife were surpassingly 
happy. " Nobody," wrote Mrs. Browning, " exactly un- 
derstands him except me, who am in the inside of him 
and hear him breathe." Through her last illness Brown- 
ing nursed her with a touching tenderness. On the 
29th of June, 1861, she died quietly in his arms, with 
the word " Beautiful " upon her lips. Her memory was 
consecrated the next fall in Prospice, with Browning's 
vision of his after-life : — 

" Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest ! " 

During his married life Browning was intimate with 
several whose names, even in so short an account, must 
at least be noted. At Florence he and his wife were 
well acquainted with Margaret Fuller Ossoli, the re- 
markable New England woman. In Paris they met, 
among others, George Sand the novelist, then at the 
height of her reputation, presiding among her " young 



536 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

men " a genoux has in her dingy salon. There, too, 
they renewed the acquaintance with Carlyle. Others 
were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted Browning's 
portrait ; Mr. and Mrs. William Story, the Americans ; 
Fanny Kemble, the actress, who, as well as Thackeray 
and his sister, frequented Mrs. Sartoris's salon in Rome ; 
Lockhart, the biographer of Scott ; Tennyson and 
Ruskin ; and Landor with his " carnivorous laughter." 

At this time, with his attention given on the one hand 
to his wife and son and on the other to a new interest 
in modeling. Browning had produced proportionately 
little poetry. Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) ; 
an Essay on Shelley (1852), his only prose work ; The 
Statue and the Bust (1855); and Men and Women 
(1855) were the only new productions between 1846 
and 1864, but in 1848 he had collected and revised 
his earlier work for publication in two volumes. 

Browning, with characteristic delicacy, repressed any 
outward show of dejection over his wife's death. He 
refused to haunt sentimentally her grave ; he would 
never indeed revisit Florence. He threw himseK into 
the education of his son and into his work — more es- 
pecially his great work, "the Roman Murder Story." 
He moved first to 19, Warwick Crescent, London, 
where he was joined by his sister Sariana after their 
father's death in 1866. Browning's words to Miss 
Blagden give a charming picture of himself, his father, 
and his wife, and of their common affection. " So 
passed away," he says, " this good, unworldly, kind- 
hearted, religious man, whose powers natural and ac- 
quired would easily have made him a notable man, had 
he known what vanity or ambition or the love of money 
or social influence meant. . . . He was worthy of 



ROBERT BROWNING 537 

being Ba's ^ father — out of the whole world, only he, 
so far as my experience goes. She loved him — and he 
said, very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that 
only that picture had put into his head that there might 
be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints. 

After this, for the most part, Browning's winters 
were spent in London, his summers usually along the 
coast of France or in Switzerland. Little by little he 
began to go again into society. His fame had at last 
become considerable, and his delightful conversation 
and quiet, courtly manners made him everywhere a 
desirable guest. A brilliant dinner party it must have 
been on February 12, 1864, at the house of Francis 
Palgrave, editor of the Golden Treasury, when, besides 
the three Palgraves, there were present Tennyson, 
Browning, and Gladstone. As time went on honors 
were heaped upon Browning. He was given honorary 
degrees by Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh; in 1871 
he was elected life governor of London University, and 
he was offered the rectorship of Glasgow and St. An- 
drew's universities and the presidency of the Words- 
worth Society. In 1881 the Browning Society, more 
than anything else a testimony of the fame he lived to 
enjoy, was started by Dr. F. J. Furnivall. The effect 
of all this adulation, although Browning was for the 
most part amused, was an increase in the grotesque man- 
nerisms which had already struck his readers. Like 
most men, the poet lost by over-much praise. 

More than half of Browning's work was done in these 
last years, but only part takes rank with his earlier 
work ; much is marked by his increasing mannerism. 
Among the best known are Dramatis Personce (1864); 

1 Elizabeth Barrett. 



538 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

The Ring and the Booh (1868); Balaustion' s Ad- 
venture and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871); 
translation of the Agamemnon of ^schylus (1877); 
Dramatic Idyls (1879 and 1880). In 1887 lie moved to 
29, DeVere Gardens, Kensington Gore, where he started 
to arrange his father's large library and to decorate 
with some of his Italian treasures. The same year he 
published Parleyiiigs with Certain People^ and the 
day of his death, December 12, 1889, Asolando. 

Of all these works, The Ping and the Book is in- 
contestably the greatest in character as well as bulk. 
A short consideration of this poem, quite aside from 
any literary discussion, is almost necessary to an under- 
standing of Browning's many-sided genius. Out of a 
little yeUow Latin book, containing the evidence for 
the execution in 1598 of one Count Guido Frances- 
chini. Browning received the impulse for the " Roman 
murder story." So much for the Booh. But Browning 
saw more in the case than the mere facts ; he saw the 
facts as presented through every conceivable witness — 
first the One Half-Rome, the popular rabble, with its 
ready sentiment ; then the Other Half -Rome, the aris- 
tocracy, with its prejudices ; next the Tertium Quid, the 
finical and pedantic few not in either half, the persons 
whose refinements reach no solution. After that the 
principal actors in the tragic story, then the advocates, 
then the Pope with his judgment, and finally the con- 
victed with his last plea, have their say ; and each 
makes so reasonable a case that it is only at the end 
that the reader finds both his reason and his best sym- 
pathy siding with Pompilia, the murdered wife. Thus 
out of some falsehood and much fiction Browning ar- 
rives, after taking every conceivable point of view, at 



ROBERT BROWNING 639 

the final truth of the matter. Here is the figure of the 
Ming : pure gold, truth, is unmalleable, but when mixed 
with alloy, the falsehood and fiction of different person- 
alities, it can be fashioned to a ring, from which the 
artificer now extracts the alloy and produces " the 
rondure brave " of pure gold — 

" Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore." 

Now the great point about The Ring and the Booh, in 
studying Browning's life, is the attitude of mind. This 
willingness — nay, this necessity — to see every side, 
even to champion the worst side, for the golden truth 
that lurks somewhere in the alloy of falsehood, char- 
acterizes most of Browning's work — except his purely 
lyrical or dramatic pieces. Accordingly, he speaks for 
Fra Lippo Lippi, for Andrea del Sarto, for Bishop 
Blougram, for Rabbi Ben Ezra, for Abt Vogler, even 
for the scoundrels, Mr. Sludge and Prince Hohenstiel- 
Schwangau. After all, says Rabbi Ben Ezra, " that 
rage was right i' the main." It would be ridiculous to 
hold that Browning hence agrees with all. It is rather 
that he believes that the greatest truths of life in its 
complexity exist, entangled with fiction and falsehood, 
in every conceivable sort of person ; indeed, that it is 
only with fiction and falsehood that truth is given to 
us, and that it is the duty of the artist thus to present 
it, not as an unreal, dissociated ideal. 

Towards the end of his life Browning turned more 
and more to Italy. As early as 1878 he began regularly 
to spend each autumn there, usually at Asolo or Venice. 
In the winter of 1887 he suffered from severe, recur- 
ring colds, but the next year he returned to England 
for the winter, and seemed to thrive on the damp cli- 



540 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 

mate. The summer of 1889 was particularly happy at 
Asolo, where he renewed the associations of Pijjpa 
Passes, first enjoyed over forty years before. In the 
following winter, however, he rapidly declined — with 
age rather than with sickness — and died at his son's 
home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice. Westminster 
Abbey claimed his body, but the loyal Venetians put 
an inscription on the wall of his son's house, with the 
lines from De Gustibus : — 

" Open my heart and you will see 
Graved inside of it ' Italy.' " 

Throughout his life Browning was — 

" One who never turned his back but marched breast-forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would tri- 
umph. 
Held we fall to rise, arfe baffled to fight better. 
Sleep to wake." 

These lines are in the last poem he wrote. "It almost 
looks like bragging to say this," he is reported to have 
remarked, " and as if I ought to cancel it ; but it 's the 
simple truth ; and as it 's true, it shall stand." For his 
was a fundamental optimism, not the careless joy that 
is dashed the minute health or projects fail. His spirit 
was as dauntless as that of the traveler in his Childe 
Roland ; he himself, in this last poem, " put the slug- 
horn to his lips and blew : " — 

" No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 
Greet the unseen with a cheer ! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
' Strive and thrive ! ' cry ' Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
There as here ! ' " 



APPENDIX 



542 GREAT ENGLISH WRITERS 



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BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Both for facts and for lists of the best biographies the Dic- 
tionary of National Biography is the most useful source. For the 
assistance of readers, however, to whom so comprehensive a work 
is not accessible there are given in the following accounts: (1) 
the chief biography of each man; (2) when this may be found too 
long, the most useful shorter biographies (not exceeding one 
volume each). 

1. For Chaucer the " Life " by A. W. Ward, in the English 
Men of Letters Series (1 vol.), is the most useful. It is based, of 
course, on the Life Records of Chaucer printed in various numbers 
of the Chaucer Society publications. Valuable for further reading 
are : " Chaucer and Some of his Friends," by G. L. Kittredge, in 
Modern Philology, i, 1 ; " English Wayfaring Life in the XIV 
Century," by Jusserand ; " Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse," 
by A. W. Pollard. 

2. For Ralegh the " Life " (2 vols.) by Edward Edwards is 
valuable chiefly for the letters it contains ; a better and shorter 
life is that (1 vol.) by W. Stabbing ; a careful though highly 
colored life is that by M. A. S. Hume. Other references : " Let- 
ters by Eminent Persons and Lives of Eminent Men,*' by John 
Aubrey ; " The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh," by J. Buchan ; " The 
Temper of the XVII Century in English Literature," by B. 
Wendell. 

3. For Spenser the best life is that (1 vol.) by R. W. Church, 
in the English Men of Letters Series. Other reference: "Some 
Landmarks in the History of English Grammar," by G. L. Kit- 
tredge. 

4. For Bacon the authority is " Francis Bacon and his Times " 
(2 vols.), by J. Spedding ; briefer is the " Life " by R. W. 
Church, in the English Men of Letters Series. 

5. For Shakespeare the fullest life is by Sidney Lee ; a 
shorter, excellent biography is that by Walter Raleigh. Readers 
are also referred to "The Development of Shakespeare as a 
Dramatist," by G. P. Baker. 

6. For Milton the " Life in Connexion with the History of his 



552 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Times" (6 vols.), by David Masson, is the standard ; "Autobio- 
graphical Selections," by H. Corson, is useful and interesting ; the 
best shorter life is by R. Garnett iu the Great Writers Series. 

7. For Bdnyan the best full account is that by John Brown ; 
the best short life is by Canon E. Venables in the Great Writers 
Series; and much material is furnished by Bunyan's " Grace 
Abounding." 

8. For Dryden Sir Walter Scott's long account is still one of 
the best ; a shorter life is by G. Saintsbury in the English Men of 
Letters Series. 

9. For Defoe the " Life " by William Lee is the best ; that by 
William Minto in the English Men of Letters Series is short and 
excellent. 

10. For Swift the " Life " (2 vols.) by Sir Walter Scott is 
still one of the best ; shorter good biographies are those by Leslie 
Stephen (English Men of Letters Series) and by John Forster ; an 
essay by A. S. Hill in the North American Review for 1868 will be 
found valuable. 

11. For Addison the most comprehensive account is that (2 
vols.) by Lucy Aiken. More valuable will be found the shorter 
lives by Dr. Johnson, Macaulay, and Thackeray, and the volume 
on Addison by W. J. Courthope in the English Men of Letters 
Series. 

12. For Pope the best life is that by W. J. Courthope (1 vol.). 
A good shorter life is by Leslie Stephen in the English Men of 
Letters Series. Other references: " Pope," by De Quincey; " Pope," 
in the " Lives of the Poets," by Dr. Johnson ; " Pope," in the 
" English Humourists," by Thackeray ; and the life by A. W. 
Ward in the Macmillan edition of Pope's works. 

13. For Johnson the authority is Boswell's " Life " (ed. by 
G. Birkbeck Hill). Shorter valuable biographies are by Leslie 
Stephen in the English Men of Letters Series, and by Macaulay 
in his " Essays." 

14. For Goldsmith the best account is Washington Irving's 
in his " Life of Goldsmith." The " Life " by Austin Dobson, in 
the Great Writers Series, is briefer, and Macaulay's vivid little 
essay must not be forgotten. 

15. For BuKKE the fullest " Life " is that by Sir James Prior. 
Briefer and more valuable is that by John Morley in the English 
Men of Letters Series. An essay by Augustine Birrell in " Obiter 
Dicta " will be found interesting. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 553 

16. For Burns the fullest life is that in the first volume of the 
edition (1834-35) by Allan Cunningham. Good shorter biographies 
are to be found in the Great Writers Series (J. S. Blackie) and 
the English Men of Letters Series (J. C. Shairp). Better known 
than any of these is Carlyle's "Essay on Burns;" and almost 
equally valuable as an interpretation is Stevenson's " Some As- 
pects of Robert Burns." 

17. For Scott the "Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott" 
(5 vols.), by J. G. Lockhart, is indisputably the authority — one of 
the greatest biographies. A shorter life by R. H. Hutton, in the 
English Men of Letters Series, is good, and the " Life " by Andrew- 
Lang, in Literary Lives, is sympathetic. 

For most of the writers of the ?arly nineteenth century, especially 
for Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and De Quincey, the following 
are full of matter : H. C. Robinson's " Diary," Dorothy Words- 
worth's "Journal," De Quincey's " Literary Reminiscences," and 
Leigh Hunt's " Autobiography." Other references are : — 

18. For Wordsworth : " Life " (3 vols.) by W. Knight ; 
" Memoirs of W. Wordsworth " (2 vols.), by Christopher Words- 
worth; and the volume by F. W. H. Meyers in the English Men 
of Letters Series. 

19. For Coleridge : " Life" (1 vol.) by J. Dykes Campbell; 
" Life " by Alois Brandl, translated by Lady Eastlake ; " Life of 
Sterling," by Carlyle ; " Biographia Literaria," by Coleridge him- 
self; and the volume by H. D. Traill in the English Men of Letters 
Series. 

20. For Lamb : "Life " (2 vols.) by E. V. Lucas ; the "Essays 
of Elia," by Lamb himself; and the volume by Canon Ainger in 
the English Men of Letters Series. 

21. For De Quincey : "Life and Writings " (2 vols.), by H. A. 
Page ; the volume by' David Masson in the English Men of Letters 
Series; and "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater " and " Au- 
tobiographic Sketches," by De Quincey himself. 

22. For Byron the fullest life is that in six volumes by Thomas 
Moore, but it is not without serious defects. Much the best life is 
that (1 vol.) by the Hon. Roden Noel, in the Great Writers Series. 
Other good lives are "Lord Byron," by Karl Elze (translated 
by A. Napier), and " The Real Lord Byron," by J. C. Jeaffre- 
son. 

23. For Shelley the " Life " (2 vols.) by Edward Dowden is 



554 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

the fullest and best. An interesting account is that in two volumes 
by Shelley's friend, T. J. Hogg. One of the best is the brief 
biography by W. M. Rossetti. The most useful, on the whole, is 
that by J. A. Symonds in the English Men of Letters Series. 

24. For Keats there is no exhaustive biography. The best 
results can probably be got from the brief account by H. Buxton 
Forman, in his edition of Keats 's works, and from the " Letters of 
Keats " (published with the works). The short life of Keats by 
Lord ~ Houghton must always be interesting ; and an essay by 
Lowell (" Literary Essays," ii) is very suggestive. The most 
convenient, if not wholly satisfactory, biography is that in one 
volume by Sidney Colvin, in the English Men of Letters Series. 

25. For Macaulay, as for Scott, there is an indisputable 
standard, the " Life and Letters " (2 vols.), by his nephew, G. O. 
Trevelyan. A good one-volume life is that by J. Cotter Morrison, 
in the English Men of Letters Series. 

26. For Carlyle much the most valuable matter is to be found 
in the voluminous correspondence of him and his vrife and in 
the « Reminiscences " (ed. by C. E. Norton, 1887). The " Life " 
(2 vols.) by J. A. Froude, though not wholly trustworthy, is the 
fullest, and must always be depended on for much. A better, 
shorter life is that by R. Garnett in the Great Writers Series; an 
excellent brief account is by David Masson, in " Carlyle : Per- 
sonally and in his Writings." Readers will of course note the par- 
tial autobiography in Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus." 

27. For RusKiN the authoritative life is that (in two volumes) 
by W. G. CoUingwood, but except for the letters contained in it, it 
is not nearly so valuable as Ruskin's own " Prseterita " (3 vols.) 
or the excellent one-volume account by Frederic Harrison in the 
English Men of Letters Series. 

28. For Arnold the best references are the " Life " by G. W. 
E. Russell and the " Letters " (ed. by G. W. E. Russell). 

29. For Dickens John Forster has done almost as well as 
Lockhart for Scott and Trevelyan for Macaulay. Those for whom 
his " Life " (2 vols.) is too long will find excellent accounts (one 
volume each) by F. T. Marzials (Great Writers Series) and by 
A. W. Ward {English Men of Letters Series). A brilliant book is 
G. K. Chesterton's " Charles Dickens," and one of the most under- 
standing is " The Childhood and Youth of Charles Dickens," by 
Robert Langton. 

30. For Thackeray the best lives are by H. Merivale and F. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 555 

T. Marzials (^Great Writers Series) and by A. TroUope, in the 
English Men of Letters Series. 

31. For George Eliot the " Life and Letters " (3 vols.) by 
her husband, J. W. Cross, is the authoritative account, but too 
unqualified in its praise. Better and shorter lives are by Oscar 
Browning (Great Writers Series) and by Leslie Stephen (English 
Men of Letters Series). 

32. For Tennyson the authority is " Alfred Lord Tennyson — 
A Memoir by his Son" (2 vols.). A shorter life is that by Sir 
Alfred Lyall, in the English Men of Letters Series. 

33. For Browning the " Life and Letters " by Mrs. Suther- 
land Orr is the fullest, but more useful and less misleading for 
those who have only a short time to spend on Browning are the 
accounts by W. Sharp (in the Great Writers Series) and by G. K. 
Chesterton (in the English Men of Letters Series). 



INDEX 



Abbotsford, 282-284. 

Absalom and Achiiophel, Dryden, 134, 
135. 

Account of the Greatest English Poets, 
Addison, 177. 

Actors, in time of Shakespeare, 74, 75. 

Ad Patrem, Milton, 94. 

Adam Bede, George Eliot, 501. 

Addison, Joseph as a moralist and 
essayist, 174; birth, 174; fondness 
for natural scenery, 175; educa- 
tion, 175-177; pension, 177; travels, 
177, 178; political advancement, 
179-181; as a wit, 179, 180; his 
dramas, 181, 182; the Spectator, 
182-185; the Guardian, etc., 185; 
quarrel with Pope, 186-188, 197- 
199; quarrel with Steele, 188, 189; 
marriage, 189; death, 189; charac- 
ter, 190; bibliography, 542. 

Adonais, Shelley, 397. 

Advancement of Knowledge, The, 
Bacon, 62. 

Adventures of Ulysses, Lamb, 338. 

.Aids to Reflection, Coleridge, 326. 

Alastor, Shelley, 391, 395. 

Album, Verses, Lamb, 344. 

Alexander's Feast, Dryden, 138. 

All for Love, Dryden, 130, 133. 

All the Year Round, Dickens's peri- 
odical, 481. 

L' Allegro, Milton, 96. 

AUingham, on Carlyle, 430. 

American Notes, Dickens, 481. 

Ancient Mariner, The, Coleridge, 
301, 318. 

Annus Mirabilis, Dryden, 132. 

Apology, Bacon, 60. 

Apology for the Voyage to Guiana, 
Ralegh, 41. 

Apparition of Mrs. Veal, Defoe, 149, 
151. 

Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 
Burke, 254. 

Appeal to Honour and Justice, An, 
Defoe, 149. 

Arcades, Milton, 96. 

Arden, Mary, 70. 

Areopagitica, Milton, 105. 



Arnold, Matthew, on Byron, 361; 
on Godwin, 391; on Keats, 405, 
406, 410; typical Englishman of 
the nineteenth century, 461, 462; 
birth and parentage, 462, 463; 
early education, 463, 464; at Ox- 
ford, 464, 465; private secretary 
to Lord Lansdowne, 466; early 
poems, 466; marriage, 466; his 
industry, 467; Poems, 467; Balder- 
Dead, 468; Merope, New Poems, 
468; On Translating Homier, Es- 
says in Criticism,, 468; death of 
child, 469; Friendship's Garland. 
Culture and Anarchy, St. Paul and 
Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, 
God and the Bible, 469, 470; Ode on 
the death of Dean Stanley, Geist'a 
Grave, 470; in America, 470, 471; 
death, 471; bibliography, 544. 

Art of Logic, Milton, 112. 

Astrophel, Spenser, 51 n. 

Aubrey, on Ralegh, 34; on Spenser, 
54; on Shakespeare, 71. 

Augustan Age, 142. 

Austin, Charles, 419. 

Bacon, Francis, Declaration on Ra- 
legh's execution, 43; his weakness, 
55; and the Earl of Essex, 55, 59, 
60; and Coke, 55, 59-61, 63-66; 
birth and early influences, 56; ed- 
ucation, 56; studies the law and 
is member of Parliament, 57; let- 
ter to Lord Burleigh, 58; essays 
58,59; the Apology, 60; marriage 
61; description of himself, 61, 62 
The Advancement of Knowledge 
62; Commentarius Solutus, 62 
The Wisdom of the Ancients, 63 
Attorney-General, 63, 64; Lord 
Chancellor, 64; Novum Organum, 
64; fall, 64r-66; History of Henry 
the Seventh, 67; service to philoso- 
phy, 67; death, 68; bibliography, 
541. 

Bailey, Archdeacon; on Keats, 399. 

Baker, G. P., on Shakespeare's Lon- 
don, 73, 74. 



558 



INDEX 



Balder Dead, Arnold, 468. 

Ballantynes, the, 279, 281, 282. 287. 

Barry Lyndon, Thackeray, 491. 

Battle of the Books, The, Swift, 160. 

Becket, Tennyson, 521. 

Bee, the, Goldsmith, 240. 

Bells and Pomegranates, Browning, 
630, 531. 

Beppo, Byron, 377. 

Bickerstaff Almanac, Swift, 162. 

Biographia Literaria, Coleridge, 325. 

Birrell, Augustine, on Burke, 246, 
247; on Lamb, 343; on Carlyle, 
429, 445. 

Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A, Browning, 
529, 531. 

Blount, Teresa and Martha, 201. 

Boece, Chaucer, 10. 

Boke of the Duchesse, Chaucer, 11. > 

Border Minstrelsy, Scott, 279. 

Borderers, The, Wordsworth, 301. 

Boswell, James, 224. 

Bride of Abydos, Byron, 371. 

Brief History of Muscovia, Milton, 
112. 

Browning, Oscar, on George Eliot, 
503, 506. 

Browning, Robert, characteristics, 
524; birth, 524; education, 525; 
health, 525, 526; childhood, 526; 
Pauline, 527; Paracelsus, 527, 528; 
and Macready, 528-530; Strafford, 
529; A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, 529, 
531 ; Sordello, 530; Bells and Pome- 
granates, 530, 531; and Elizabeth 
Barrett, 531-533; marriage, 534; 
in Italy, 534; death of Mrs. Brown- 
ing, 535; friends and acquaint- 
ances, 535, 536; picture of family 
life, 536, 537; honors, 537; later 
works, 537, 538; The Ring and the 
Book, 538, 539; death, 540; opti- 
mism, 540; bibliography, 545. 

Browning, Mrs., 531-535. 

Bulwer, New Timon, quoted, 511. 

Bunyan, John, Pilgrim's Progress, 
115, 121-126; birth and parentage, 
116; statement that he was a sin- 
ner, how to be taken, 116; service 
as a soldier, 117; conversion, 117- 
120; as a preacher, 120, 124; writ- 
ings, 120, 121; imprisonment, 121- 
123; death, 125; personal appear- 
ance, 125, 126; bibliography, 642. 

Burke, Edmund, and Goldsmith. 
243; his store of knowledge and 
his fervor, 246; birth, 246; educa- 



tion, 246, 247; early writings, 247, 
248; marriage, 248; at the Club, 
248; at Beaconsfield, 249, 250; his 
attitude on political questions, 250, 
251; on the American question, 
251 , 252 ; Paymaster of Forces, 252 ; 
loss of popularity, 252; in the Hast- 
ings trial, 253 ; attitude toward 
France, 253, 254; Appeal from the 
New to the Old Whigs, 254; last 
years and death, 254, 255; poetic 
and philosophical, 256 ; bibliogra- 
phy, 542. 

Burns, Robert, two sides to his na- 
ture, 259; birth, 260; education, 
260; farm Ufe, 260-262; person- 
ality, 261; love affairs, 262-265; 
his poetry the result of love, 266; 
at Edinburgh, 266; retires to Ellis- 
land, 268; as excise officer, 268, 
269; last days and death, 269, 270; 
anecdotes, 270, 271; songs, 271, 
272; lacked a central guiding prin- 
ciple, 272, 273; Carlyle's Essay on, 
436; bibliography, 543. 

Byron, G. G. N., character, 361, 382; 
object of adulation and of cal- 
umny, 362; facts of life falsified, 
362; a weak man, 363; ancestry, 
363, 364; childhood, 364; educa- 
tion, 364-369; early loves, 366; 
Hours of Idleness and English 
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 369; 
on the Continent, 370; Childe 
Harold, Maid of Athens, Hints 
from Horace, 370, 376; Giaour, 
Bride of Abydos, Corsair, Lara, 
371; marriage, 371, 372; separa- 
tion from Lady Byron, 372-375; 
loss of popular favor, 375, 376; 
leaves England, 376; and Shelley, 
376-379; dissipation at Venice, 
377; and Countess Guiccioli, 377; 
works written at Venice, 377; 
Don Juan, 377-379; at Pisa, 378, 
379; and Hunt, 379; other writ- 
ings, 379, 380; in Greece, 380, 381; 
death, 381; on SheUey, 385, 386; 
bibliography, 543. 

Cadiz, battle of, 32. 
Cain, Byron, 378. 
Campaign, The, Addison, 179. 
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, portraits 

in, 6, 7; character of, 11, 12. 
Captain Carleton, Defoe, 152. 
Captain Singleton, Defoe, 151. 



INDEX 



559 



Carlyle, Thomas, on Burns, 272; 
on Wordsworth, 303-305; his 
picture of Coleridge, 328, 329; on 
De Quincey, 357; his gospel, 428, 
439, 440, 445; and Froude, 428, 
429, 434, 436, 442; his cynicism, 
429, 430; Sartor Resartus, 430-432, 
437; birth, 430; education, 431; 
and Edward Irving, 431; his re- 
ligious crisis, 432, 433; marriage, 
433, 434; and Mrs. Carlyle, 434, 
435; early writings, 435, 436; and 
Goethe, 435; at Craigenputtock, 
436; at Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 438; 
The French Revolution, 438; Heroes 
and Hero-Worship, 438, 439; per- 
sonal appearance, 440; his friends, 
441; other works, 441, 442; dif- 
ference with Mrs. Carlyle, 442, 443; 
death of Mrs. Carlyle, 443, 444; 
last years and death, 444; esti- 
mate of, 444^446; on Ruskin, 456; 
on Dickens, 479; on Thackeray, 
486, 493; on Tennyson, 514; on 
Browning, 530; bibliography, 544. 

Cato, Addison, 181, 186, 198. 

Cenci, The, Shelley, 394, 395. 

Charge of the Light Brigade, Tenny- 
son, 518. 

Chartism, Carlyle, 440. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, father of English 
poetry, 1, 18; birth and ancestry, 
2-4; attitude toward higher classes, 
3; in domestic service, 4; educa- 
tion, 4; knowledge of Latin, 4, 10; 
as page and soldier, 5; portraits in 
Canterbury Tales, 6, 7; diplomatic 
missions of, 7, 10; and Petrarch 
7; and Dante, 8, 11; married, 8, 9 
and John of Gaunt, 8-10, 13, 14 
Comptroller, 9, 10; the Boece, 10 
French and Italian influences, 11 
character of Canterbury Tales, 11 
12; Legende of Good Women, 12, 13 
his amusements, 12-14; his re- 
ligion, 13, 14; his friends and dis- 
ciples, 14, 15, 19; last years, 15, 
16; personal appearance, 16, 17; 
combines modern and mediaeval, 
17; bibliography, 541. 

Chesterton, G. K., Pope and the Art 
■ of Satire, 188 n.; on Dickens, 478; 
on Browning, 532, 533. 

Childe Harold, Byron, 370, 376. 

Chimes, The, Dickens, 481. 

Christabel, Coleridge, 318. 

Christmas Carol, Dickens, 481. 



Church, Dean, on Bacon, 57. 

Citizen of the World, Goldsmith, 240. 

Clarke, C. C, on Keats, 400, 401. 

Clifford, Sir Lewis, 14. 

Cobham, Lord, 34^36. 

Coke, Sir Edward, 36, 55, 59-61, 63- 
66. 

Coleridge, S, T., on Goldsmith, 245; 
Ancient Mariner, 301, 318; his ir- 
resolution, 310, 311; childhood, 
311,312; education, 312-315; Pan- 
tisocracy, 314; Mary Evans, 314, 
315; marriage, 315; The Watch- 
man, 316; takes opium, 316; and 
Wordsworth, 301, 316-318; per- 
sonal appearance, 317; Remorse, 
318, 324; Christabel, and other 
poems, 318, 319; Kubla Khan, 319; 
in Germany, 320; at Greta Hall, 
321; unhappiness and despond- 
ency, 321-323; in Malta, 323; sepa- 
ration from wife, 323, 324; moves 
to London, 324; Lectures, 324, 325; 
Biographia Literaria and Sibylline 
Leaves, 325: at Gillman's, 326, 
327; Carlyle's picture of him, 328, 
329; death, 330; bibhography, 
543. 

Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 
Spenser, 51. 

Collier, Jeremy, 137. 

Colonel Jack, Defoe, 151. 

Commentarius Solutus, Bacon, 62. 

Commonwealth, the, 106, 107. 

Complete English Tradesman, Defoe, 
151. 

Compleynt of Chaucer to his Purse, 
The, Chaucer, 16. 

Compleynt unto Pite, The, Chaucer, 8. 

Comus, Milton, 96, 97. 

Conciliation with the American Colo- 
nies, Burke, 251. 

Confessio Amantis, Gower, 14. 

Confessions of an English Opium- 
Eater, The, De Quincey, 354, 355. 

Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, 
Coleridge, 327. 

Congreve, William, Dryden's tribute 
to, 137. 

Corsair, Byron, 371. 

Cricket on the Hearth, The, Dickens, 
481. 

Criticism, new epoch opened by Ar- 
nold, 467, 468. 

Cromwell, 106, 107. 

Cross, J. W., on George Eliot, 498, 
502; married to George Eliot, 505. 



560 



INDEX 



Crossing the Bar, Tennyson, 521, 522. 
Crown of Wild Olive, Ruskin, 455. 
Culture and Anarchy, Arnold, 469. 
Cymbeline, Shakespeare, 79, 523. 

Daisy, The, Tennyson, 517. 

Daniel Deronda, George Eliot, 505. 

Dante, and Chaucer, 8, 11. 

Davies, on Shakespeare, 73. 

De Doctrina Christiana, Milton, 112. 

De Quincey, Thomas, various in 
character, 347; a dreamer, 347; 
of great intellectual force, 347, 348; 
birth, 348; childhood, 348, 349; 
education, 349-351; in London, 
351; takes opium, 351, 352, 354, 
355; friends, 352, 353; beginnings 
of literary career, 353, 354; The 
Confessions of an English Opium- 
Eater, 354, 355; other works, 355, 
356; Suspiria, 356; personal ap- 
pearance, 357; characteristics, 357, 
358; humor, 359; pathos in his life, 
359; death, 360; bibliography, 543. 

Decadence, the, 87. 

Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, Mil- 
ton, 107. 

Defoe, Daniel, full of contradictions, 
143; variety of pursuits, 143; birth 
and education, 144; in business, 
144, 145; in politics, 145, 147-149; 
political pamphlets, 145; trial for 
Ubel, 146; Hymn to the Pillory, 147; 
in prison, 147; his writings, 149- 
152; last years and death, 152; 
his loneliness, 152; bibliography, 
542. 

Dennis, John, 186, 196-198. 

Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth, 
301. 

Deserted Village, Goldsmith, 231, 
242, 245. 

Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, The, 
Chaucer, 8. 

Dialogue between a Jesuit and a Re- 
cusant, A, Ralegh, 38. 

Dickens, Charles, on Wordsworth, 
303; his kindliness and his courage, 
472, 473; birth and childhood, 474, 
475; schooling, 475; as reporter, 
476; early love, 476, 477; marriage, 
477; Sketches by Boz, 477; Pick- 
wick Club, 478; Oliver Twist, Nicho- 
las Nickleby, Master Humphrey's 
Clock, The Old Curiosity Shop, 
Bamaby Rudge, 478; friends, 479; 
personality, 479; first visit to 



America, 480; Christmas stories, 
481; other works, 481, 482; sepa- 
ration from Mrs. Dickens, 482, 483; 
at Gad's Hill Place, 483; public 
lectures, 482 ; second visit to Amer- 
ica, 482; Heath, 482; an enduring 
name, 482, 483; compared with 
Thackeray as a lecturer, 492, 493; 
quarrel with Thackeray, 495; 
bibliography, 544. 

Diodati, Charles, 90, 92, 96, 100. 

Directions to Servants, Swift, 171. 

Discourse of the Invention of Ships, 
The, Ralegh, 38. 

Discourse on Tenures which were 
before the Conquest, A, Ralegh, 38. 

Discourses in America, Arnold, 470. 

Discovery of Guiana, Ralegh, 31. 

Divorce, Milton's treatises on, 104. 

Doe, Charles, on Bunyan, 124, 125. 

Dombey and Son, Dickens, 482. 

Don Juan, Byron , 377-379. 

Dormer's News-Letter, Defoe, 150. 

Drummer, Addison, 181. 

Dryden, John, on Chaucer, 18; on 
Spenser, 44; on George Duke of 
Buckingham, 69; his place in lit- 
erature, 128; character of his times 
128, 129; immorality in his works 
129; contradictions in, 129, 130 
birth and education, 130, 131 
marriage and family life, 131, 132 
dramatic career, 132, 133, 137 
Absalom and Achitophel, 134, 135 
The Medal and MacFlecknoe, 135 
change of faith, 136, 137; Religio 
Laid and The Hind and the Pan- 
ther, 136; last years, 138; death, 
139; personal appearance and char- 
acter, 139; bibliography, 542. 

Duncan Campbell, Defoe, 151. 

Dunciad, Pope, 146, 204-206. 

Eatwell, Dr., 352. 

Education, Milton, 105. 

Eighteenth century, its characteristic, 
140; chief interests of men in, 140; 
the life of, 140, 141; character of 
the literature of, 141, 142. 

Eikonoklastes, Milton, 107. 

Elia, Lamb , 342-344. 

Eliot, George, conspicuous for the 
masculine nature of her thought, 
497; heavy manner of writing, 497, 
498; personality, 498, 503; birth 
and childhood, 498, 499; beginning 
of literary labors, 500; and Lewes, 



INDEX 



561 



500, 501 ; Scenes from Clerical Life, 
601; Adam Bede, 501; The Mill on 
the Floss, 501; Silas Marner, 502; 
Romola, 502; Felix Holt, 503; in 
Spain, 504; Middlemarch, 504; 
Daniel Deronda, 505 ; death of 
Lewes, 505; Theophrastus Such, 
505; marriage to Cross, 505; death, 
506; bibhography, 545. 

Ellwood, Thomas, 111, 112. 

Emerson, R. W., and Cariyle, 440, 
441. 

Empedocles on Etna, Arnold, 466, 
468. 

Endymion, Keats, 404. 

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
Byron, 369. 

English Humourists, The, Thackeray, 
492. 

English language, use in 14th cen- 
tury, 1. 

Englishman, The, 185. 

Enoch Arden, Tennyson, 520. 

Epipsychidion, Shelley, 397. 

Epitaph on Shakespeare, Milton, 93. 

Epitaph on the Marchioness of Win- 
chester, Miltou, 93. 

Epitaphium Damonis, Milton, 100. 

Essay, form of prose composition in 
18th century, 142; in the Victo- 
rian Age, 413; of Macaulay, 420, 
421 ; of Cariyle, 435. 

Essay on Burns, Cariyle, 436. 

Essay on Criticism, Pope, 197. 

Essay on Dramatic Poesy, Dryden, 
133. 

Essay on Johnson, Cariyle, 437. 

Essay on Man, Pope, 203. 

Essay on Projects, Defoe, 145, 146. 

Essays in Criticism, Arnold, 468. 

Essex, Eari of, 33, 52, 55, 59, 60. 

Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin, 455. 

Eve of St. Agnes, Keats, 408. 

Eve of St. John, Scott, 279. 

Evening Walk, The, Wordsworth, 
301. 

Every Man in his Humour, Jonson, 
82. 

Everybody's Business is Nobody's 
Business, Defoe, 151. 

Excursion, Wordsworth, 306. 

Fables, Dryden, 137. 

Faerie Queen, Spenser, 28, 44, 49-52, 

54. 
Family Instructor, The, Defoe, 149. 
Farewell to the Court, Ralegh, 29. 



Fayal, Ralegh's attack on, 32, 33. 
Fears in Solitude, Coleridge, 319. 
Felix Holt, George Eliot, 503. 
Findlay, J. R., on De Quineey, 357. 
FitzGerald, Edward, on Tennyson, 

512, 515. 
Flower and the Leaf, 13. 
Fors Clavigera, Ruskin, 447, 448, 

455-457. 
Forster, John, 479, 528. 
Four Georges, The, Thackeray, 494. 
Freeholder, The, 185. 
French language, use in England in 

14th century, 1. 
French Revolution, The, Cariyle, 438. 
Friendship' s Garland, Arnold, 469. 
Frost at Midnight, Coleridge, 319. 
Froude, J. A., on Cariyle, 428, 434, 

436, 442. 
Furnivall, Dr., quoted on Chaucer, 

16, 17. 

Galileo, 98. 

Garnett, Dr., on Milton, 103, 106, 
113; on Cariyle, 440. 

Geist's Grave, Arnold, 470. 

Giaour, Byron, 371. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 25. 

Gladstone, W. E., on Macaulay, 423; 
and Tennyson, 522. 

God and the Bible, Arnold, 470. 

Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, 390. 

Goethe, on Byron, 382; and Cariyle, 
435; quoted, 445, 446. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, his singularity, 
231; birth and parentage, 231; 
early education, 232; at Trinity 
College, 232-235; studies for the 
Church, 235; the Cork adventure, 
235; at Edinburgh, 236; on the 
Continent, 236, 237; beginnings of 
literary career, 238-240; and 
Johnson, 240, 241; at the Club, 
240, 241; The Traveller, The De- 
serted Village, The Vicar of Wake- 
field, The Good-Natured Man, She 
Stoops to Conquer, 242; his sim- 
plicity, 243; and" the " Jessamy 
Bride," 244; death, 244, 245; his 
charm, 245; bibliography, 542. 

Good-Natured Man, The, Goldsmith, 
242. 

Gordon, Dr.. on Cariyle, 430. 

Gower, 14, 15. 

Grace Abounding, Bunyan, 116, 121. 

Greene, Groat' s-worth of Wit, 75. 

Grenville, Sir Richard, 29. 



562 



INDEX 



Groat' s-worth of Wit, Greene, 75. 

Grotius, Hugo, 98. 

Guardian, The, 185. 

Guiana, expeditions of Ralegh to, 

.31-33, 39-41. 
Guiceioii, Countess, 377. 
Guilt and Sorrow, Wordsworth, 301. 
Gulliver's Travels, Swift, 170. 

Hallam, A. H., 509. 

Harold, Tennyson, 521. 

Harrison, Frederic, on Raskin, 457. 

Harvey, Gabriel, 46, 47. 

Hathaway, Ann, 72. 

Hellas, SheUey, 397. 

Henry Esmond, Thackeray, 492. 

Heroes and Hero-Worship, Carlyle, 
438, 439. 

Highland Mary, Burns, 263. 

Hill, A. S., on Swift, 155. 

Hill, Birkbeck, on Johnson, 223. 

Hind and the Panther, The, Dryden, 
136. 

Hints from Horace, Byron, 370. 

History of Britain, Milton, 112. 

History of England, The, Macaulay, 
425, 426. 

History of Frederick II, Carlyle, 441, 
442. 

History of Henry the Seventh, Bacon, 
67. 

History of the Devil, Defoe, 152. 

History of the Great Storm, Defoe, 147. 

History of the Union, Defoe, 149. 

History of the Wars of Charles XII, 
A, Defoe, 150., 

History of the World, Ralegh, 38, 39. 

Hoccleve, Thomas, 15, 18. 

Hogg, T. J., on Shelley, 385-387. 

Holy City, The, Banyan, 121. 

Holy Willie's Prayer, Burns, 262, 263. 

Homer, Pope, 187, 199. 

Hood, on De Quincey, 358. 

House of Fame, Chaucer, 4, 8, 11. 

Household Words, Dickens's periodi- 
cal, 481. 

Hours of Idleness, Byron, 369. 

Hunt, Leigh, description of Christ 
Hospital School, 334; on Lamb, 
340; on Byron, 367; and Byron, 
379; and Shelley, 393; Shelley's 
epitaph, 398. 

Hymn to the Pillory, Defoe, 147. 

Hyperion, Keats, 408. 

Idiot Boy, The, Wordsworth, 301. 
Idler, The, Johnson, 223. 



Idylls of the King, Tennyson, 519, 521. 

Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 
The, George Eliot, 505. 

In Memoriam, Tennyson, 509, 512, 
516, 520. 

Indian Emperor, Dryden, 132. 

Inquiry into the State of Polite Learn- 
ing in Europe, Goldsmith, 240. 

Irene, Johnson, 215, 218. 

Irving, Washington, on Goldsmith, 
231, 238; at Abbotsford, 283. 

Isabella, Keats, 408. 

Jacobean Age, 87. 

Johan, Lewis, 2, 3. 

John or Gaunt, 8-10, 13, 14. 

John Woodvil, Lamb, 338. 

Johnson, Esther, 155, 160-163, 168- 
171. 

Johnson, Samuel, on Milton, 103; 
on Dryden, 136; on Swift, 156, 158, 
165; on Addison, 175, 176, 185; 
on Pope, 194, 206, 208; example of 
character outlasting performance, 
210; birth, 211; education, 212, 
213; marriage, 214; in London, 
215-217; Irene, 215, 218; contribu- 
tor to the Gentleman's Magazine, 
215, 216; London, 216, 218; the 
Dictionary, 218, 221, 222, 227; the 
Rambler, 218, 219; his practice of 
morality, 219, 220; friends, 221, 
224; his edition of Shakespeare, 
222, 223; the Idler, 223; Rasselas, 
223; pensioned, 223; Boswell, 
224; at the Club, 224, 225; the 
Thrales, 226, 228; honors, 226; 
life in London, 227; Taxation no 
Tyranny, Journey to the Western 
Islands of Scotland, and Lives of 
the English Poets, 227, 228; last 
years and death, 229, 230; and 
Goldsmith, 240, 241; on Goldsmith, 
244; on Burke, 248, 249; Carlyle's 
Essay on, 437; bibliography, 542. 

Jonson, Ben, on Bacon, 57; on 
Shakespeare, 71; and Shakespeare, 
82, 84, 85. 

Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe, 
151. 

Journal to Stella, Swift, 168. 

Journey to the Western Islands of 
Scotland, Johnson, 227. 

Jubal, George Eliot, 504. 

Keats, John, on Chaucer, 18; as a 
man, 399; birth and parentage, 



INDEX 



563 



399; education, 400, 401; friends 
and acquaintances, 402; his sen- 
sitiveness, 403, 404, 410; Endy- 
mion, 404; attacked by reviewers, 
404, 405; and Fanny Brawne, 405- 
407;consumption, 405-409; Lamia, 
Isabella, Eve of St. Agnes, Hype- 
rion, 408; death, 409; bibliography, 
544. 

Kelly, Fanny, 342. 

King, Edward, 97. 

Kingsley, Charles, quoted on Ralegh, 
25. 

Kirke, Edward, 46, 47. 

Kittredge, G. L., on Chaucer, 2, 
13 n., 14. 

Klosterheim, De Quincey, 355. 

Kubla Khan, Coleridge, 319. 

Lady of the Lake, Scott, 281. 

Lamb, Charles, on Coleridge, 310, 
312, 313, 315, 323, 324, 326; and 
Coleridge, 318; men whom we 
meet in his writings, 331; lovable 
quaUty of, 332; childhood, 332, 
333; education, 334, 335; in Little 
Queen Street, 335; The Old Fa- 
miliar Faces, 336, 337; life with 
sister, 337, 338; writings, 338; his 
flavor of the past, 339; personal 
appearance, 339, 340; convivial- 
ity, 341; stuttering, 341; and 
Fanny Kelly, 342; Elia, 342-344; 
Letters, 343; death, 344, 345; 
anecdotes, 345, 346; bibliography, 
543. 

Lamb, Mary, 336-338. 

Lament of Tasso, Byron, 377. 

Lamia, Keats, 408. 

Lang, Andrew, on Scott, 277, 278. 
283, 291. 

Lara, Byron, 371. 

Laud, Archbishop William, 100-102, 
105. 

Lawes, Henry, 96. 

Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott, 280. 

Lay Sermons, Coleridge, 326. 

Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay, 
425. 

Lectures, Coleridge, 324, 325. 

Lee, Sidney, on Shakespeare, 80, 83. 

Legende of Good Wom£n, Chaucer, 12, 
13. 

Letter to a Noble Lord, Burke, 255. 

Letters, Lamb, 343. 

Letters on a Regicide Peace, Burke, 
255. 



Lewes, G. H., 500, 501, 505. 

Leyden, John, 279, 280 

Life and Death of Mr. Badttian, 

Bunyan, 121. 
Life of Schiller, Cariyle, 435. 
Lines on an Autum,nal Evening, Cole- 
ridge, 313. 
Lines Written above Tintern Abbey, 

Wordsworth, 301. 
Literature and Dogma, Arnold, 470. 
Lives of the Poets, Johnson, 223, 227, 

228. 
Lloyd, Charles, 318, 337. 
Lockhart, J. G., 276, 284, 288-290. 
Logic of Political Economy, The, De 

Quincey, 355. 
London, at time of Shakespeare, 73, 

74; in the eighteenth century, 140, 

141. 
London, poem by Johnson, 216. 
Lovel the Widower, Thackeray, 494. 
Lowell, J. R., on Milton, 94; on 

Keats, 399, 403, 405; on Cariyle, 

444. 
Lucas, E. v., Life of Lamb, 345. 
Lucy, Sir Thomas, 72, 73. 
Lucy Gray, Wordsworth, 301. 
Lycidas, Milton, 95, 97. 
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and 

Coleridge, 301, 318. 

M. B. Drapier Letters, Swift, 1 70. 

Macaulay, T. B., on Archbishop Wil- 
liam Laud, 100; on Milton, 103, 
107; on Bunyan, 116, 117; on Ad- 
dison, 182, 183, 185, 189; on 
Steele, 189; on Holland House, 
189; his life of Johnson, 210; on 
Johnson, 225; no lack of interest in 
his life, 414, 415; without spiritual 
interest, 414, 415; birth and par- 
entage, 416; boyhood, 416, 417; 
childhood writings, 417; educa- 
tion, 417-419; youthful letter, 418, 
419; essays, 420, 421; as a talker, 
421; personal appearance, 421, 
422; family Ufe, 422, 423; in poli- 
tics, 423, 425; in India, 423, 424; 
his reading, 424, 425; his memory, 
425; Lays of Ancient Rome, 425; 
The History of England, 425, 426; 
death, 426; estimate of character, 
427; bibliography, 544. 

Macbeth, Shakespeare, 77. 

MacFlecknoe, Dryden, 135. 

Macready, William, 528-530. 

Maid of Athens, Byron, 370. 



564 



INDEX 



Manfred, Byron, 376, 377. 

Marino Faliero, Byron, 378. 

Marlowe, Christopher, 75, 78, 82. 

Marmion, Scott, 280. 

Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens, 481. 

Mary in Heaven, Bums, 263. 

Masques, 87, 96. 

Masson, Professor, on Milton, 95, 
104; on De Quincey, 356, 357; on 
Carlyle, 429, 430. 

Maud, Tennyson, 517, 518. 

Maxims of Stale, The, Ralegh, 38. 

Mazeppa, Byron, 377. 

Measure for Measure, Shakespeare, 
79. 

Medal, The, Dryden, 135. 

Meditations upon a Broom-Stick, 
Swift, 169 n. 

Memoirs of a Cavalier, Defoe, 151. 

Mercaior, Defoe, 149. 

Mercurius Politicus, Defoe, 150. 

Meres, Francis, on Shakespeare, 80. 

Merope, Arnold, 468. 

Merry Wives of Windsor, Shake- 
speare, 77. 

Middlemarch, George Eliot, 504. 

Midsummer Night's Dream, Shake- 
speare, 77. 

Mill on the Floss, The, George Eliot, 
501. 

Milton, John, on Spenser, 44; his love 
of the beautiful and his service of 
duty, 90; Paradise Regained, 90, 
112; birth, 90, 91; boyhood and 
education, 92, 93; early poems, 93, 
94; personal appearance, 94; dis- 
position, 94, 95; why he did not 
take orders, 95; at Horton, 95, 96; 
poems composed at Horton, 96; 
Arcades and Comus, 96, 97; letters 
to Diodati, 96, 97; Lycidas, 97; 
traveling abroad, 98-100; Para- 
dise Lost, 100, 111, 112, 129, 130; 
return to England, 100; his rela- 
tion to Puritanism and Presby- 
terianism, 102, 103; pamphlets on 
church government, 103, 104; 
marriage and treatises on Divorce, 
104; Education and Areopagitica, 
105; The Tenure of Kings and 
Magistrates, 106; in the Common- 
wealth, 106, 107; second marriage, 
108; sonnets, 108, 109; under the 
Restoration, 109, 110; third mar- 
riage, 110; his undutiful daughters, 
110, 111; productions of his last 
years, 112; last days and death. 



113; the man and the poet, 113, 

114; bibliography, 541. 
Minto, Mr., on Defoe, 144, 148, 152. 
Mist's Journal, 150. 
Modern Painters, Ruskin, 453. 
Modest Proposal, A, Swift, 171. 
Moll Flanders, Defoe, 151. 
Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 201. 
Morritt, Mr., of Rokeby, 280. 
Morus (More), 107. 
Mother Hubberd's Tale, Spenser, 48, 

51. 
Mr. H., Lamb, 338. 
Mrs. Leicester's School, Lamb, 338. 
Munera Pulveris, Ruskin, 455. 

Narrative of the Frenzy of J. D., 

Pope, 186, 198. 
Necessity of Atheism, The, Shelley, 

387. 
Neilson, Dr., on Milton, 88. 
New Discovery of an Old Intrigue, A, 

Defoe, 145. 
New Poems, Arnold, 468. 
Newcomes, The, Thackeray, 492. 
Newspapers, the beginnings of, 140. 
Nichol, Professor, on Byron, 382; on 

Carlyle, 440. 
".North, Christopher," see Wilson, 

John. 
Northern Farmer, The, Tennyson, 

520. 
Norton, C. E., suggested Ruskin's 

Prosterita, 459. 
Novel, form of prose composition in 

eighteenth century, 142; in Vic- 
torian Age, 412. 
Novum Organum, Bacon, 64. 
Nut-Brown Maid, 20. 
Nutting, Wordsworth, 301. 

Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
Wordsworth, 306, 307. 

Ode on Solitude, Pope, 193. 

Ode on the death of Dean Stanley, 
Arnold, 470. 

Ode on the Morning of Christ's Na- 
tivity, Milton, 93. 

Ode to Dejection, Coleridge, 322, 323. 

Ode to France, Coleridge, 319. 

(Enone, Tennyson, 510. 

Old Blind Margaret, Lamb, 338. 

Old Familiar Faces, The, Lamb, 336, 
337. 

On Having Arrived at the Age of 
Twenty-three, Milton, 93, 94. 

On his Blindness, Milton, 109. 



INDEX 



565 



On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying 

of a Cough, Milton, 93. 
On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, 

Milton, 109. 
On the New Forcers of Conscience, 

Milton, 103. 
On Time, Milton, 96. 
On Translating Homer, Arnold, 468. 
Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, 

Shelley, 385. 
Ossoli, M. F., 535. 

Paracelsus, Browning, 527, 528. 

Paradise Lost, Milton, 100, 111, 112, 
129, 130. 

Paradise Regained, Milton, 90, 112. 

Paraphrases of Psalms CXIV and 
CXXXVI, Milton, 93. 

Parasina, Byron, 371. 

Passion, The, Milton, 93. 

Past and Present, Carlyle, 440. 

Pastorals, Pope, 193. 

Pater, Walter, 257. 

Pattison, on Milton's first treatise on 
Divorce, 104. 

Pauline, Browning, 527. 

Pearl, 19. 

Pendennis, Thackeray, 492. 

Penseroso, II, Milton, 96. 

Petrarch, and Chaucer, 7. 

Phillipps, Ambrose, 186, 198. 

Phillips, Milton's nephew, on Mil- 
ton's first treatise on Divorce, 104; 
on Milton's inspiration, 111. 

Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin 
of our Ideas on the Sublime and the 
Beautiful, Burke, 247. 

Pickwick Club, Dickens, 478. 

Pictures from Italy, Dickens, 481. 

Pilgrim,'s Progress, Bunyan, 115, 
121-126. 

Poems by Two Brothers, Tennyson, 
508. 

Poet's Epitaph, A, Wordsworth, 301. 

Polite Conversation, Swift, 171. 

Pollard, cited, 20. 

Pope, Alexander, on Bacon, 55; on 
Shakespeare, 81 ; on Defoe, 146; on 
Swift, 158; on Addison, 180; quar- 
rel with Addison, 186-188, 197- 
199; quarrel with Dennis, 186, 196- 
198; Rape of the Lock, 186,187, 197, 
198; Homer, 187, 199 ; unique 
position of, 191; birth, 191, 192; 
education, 192; precocity, 192, 
193; the Pastorals, 193; the Dun- 
ciad, 194, 204-206; of quarrelsome 



nature, 194, 195; physical and men- 
tal weakness, 194, 195; friends of, 
195; quarrel with Wycherley, 196; 
Essay on Criticism, 197; life at 
Twickenham, 200-203; and the 
Misses Blount, 201; and Lady 
Mary Wortley Montagu, 202; Es- 
say on Man, 20Z; and Curll, 207; 
death, 207, 208; character, 208, 
209; on Johnson, 216; bibliogra- 
phy, 542. 

Praed, on Macaulay, 421, 422. 

Prceterita, Ruskin, 449, 456, 459, 460. 

Prelude, Wordsworth, 301. 

Pre-Raphaelitism, Ruskin, 454. 

Prerogative of Parliaments, The, 
Ralegh, 38. 

Presbyterianism, 102, 103. 

Princess, The, Tennyson, 515, 516. 

Prisoner of Chilian, Byron, 376. ^^ 

Prolusiones Oratorim, Milton, 94. 

Prometheus, Byron, 376. 

Promise of May, The, Tennyson, 521. 

Prothalamion, Spenser, 45, 53. 

Puritanism, 87-90, 100-103, 115. 

Queen Anne Age, 142. 
Queen Mab, Shelley, 389. 
Queen Mary, Tennyson, 521. 

Ralegh, Walter, his versatility, 22, 
23; birth and parentage, 23; early 
life, 24, 25; in Ireland, 25, 26; at 
the court, 26, 27; interest in colo- 
nization, 27, 28; warfare against 
Spain, 28-32; and Spenser, 28, 49, 
51; as a poet, 29; and Elizabeth 
Throckmorton, 30; his pride and 
unpopularity, 30, 31; expeditions 
to Guiana, 31-33, 39-41; Discov- 
ery of Guiana, 31 ; attack on Fayal, 
31, 32; governor of Jersey, 33; and 
Essex, 33; in last years of Eliza- 
beth's reign, 34; and James, 34, 35, 
37; and Lord Cobham, 34-36; 
trial and imprisonment, 36-38; 
works written in prison, 38; His- 
tory of the World, 38, 39; second 
trial and execution, 41-43; Apology 
for the Voyage to Guiana, 41 ; bib- 
liography, 541. 

Raleigh, Professor, on Shakespeare, 
72, 85, 86. 

Rambler, the, Johnson, 218, 219. 

Rape of Lucrece, The, Shakespeare, 76. 

Rape of the Lock, Pope, 186, 187, 197, 
198. 



566 



INDEX 



Rasselas, Johnson 223. 

Ready and Eas^y Way to Establish a 
Free Commonwealth, Milton, 108. 

Reason of Church-Government, The, 
Milton, 95. 

Recluse, The, Wordsworth, 308. 

Reflections on the Revolution, Burke, 
253. 

Religio Laid, Dryden, 136. 

Reminiscences, Carlyle, 443, 444. 

Remorse, Coleridge, 318, 324. 

Report of the Truth of the Fight about 
the Isles of the Azores, Ralegh, 29. 

Restoration, the, 128, 131. 

Retaliation, Goldsmith, 243. 

Review of the Affairs of France, Defoe, 
147. 

Richardson, Samuel, 238, 239. 

Ring and the Book, The, Browning, 
538, 539. 

Rival Ladies, The, Dryden, 132. 

Robespierre, Coleridge and Southey, 
315. 

Robin Hood cycle, 19. 

Robinson Crusoe, Defoe, 151. 

Romanticism, Age of, 256-258. 

Romaunt of the Rose, Chaucer, 11. 

Romola, George Eliot, 502. 

Rosamund, Addison, 181. 

Roundabout Papers, Thackeray, 494. 

Rowe, on Shakespeare, 72. 

Roxana, Defoe, 151. 

Ruined Cottage, The, Wordsworth, 
301. 

Ruines of Tirrije, Spenser, 51. 

Ruskin, Join- on Carlyle, 445; his 
sensibility, 447, 448; Fora Cla- 
vigera, 447, 448, 455-t57; birth 
and parentage, 448, 449; Prceterita, 
449, 456. 459,460; education, 449- 
452; on the Continent, 450, 451; 
and Clotilde Domecq, 452, 453; 
Modem Painters, 453; Seven Lamps 
of Architecture, Pre-Raphaelitism, 
Stones of Venice, 454; marriage and 
dissolution of, 454; Professor at 
Oxford, 455; Unto this Last, Mu- 
nera Pulveris, Ethics of the Dust, 
Sesame and Lilies, Crown of Wild 
Olive, 465, 456; attacks material- 
istic philosophy, 455, 456; insti- 
tutions founded by, 457; increased 
querulousness in later years, 458, 
459; last years and death, 459; a 
prophet, 459, 460; bibliography, 
544. 

Ruth, Wordsworth, 301. 



Sacheverell, Dr., and Defoe, 148. 

St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian, Shelley, 
385. 

St. Paul and Protestantism, Arnold, 
469. 

Salmasius, Claudius, 107. 

Samson Agonistes, Milton, 112, 114. 

Sand, George, 535. 

Sardanapalus, Byron, 378. 

Sartor Resartus, Carlyle, 430-432, 437. 

Satan in Search of a Wife, Lamb, 
344. 

Satire, of Dryden, 134, 135; in eigh- 
teenth century, 142; of Defoe, 143, 
145, 146; of Swift, 154, 170, 171; 
of Pope, 187, 194, 198; of Byron, 
369, 370; of Thackeray, 488, 492, 
494. 

Saved by Grace, Bunyan, 121. 

Savoy Marriage, The, Ralegh, 38. 

Scenes from Clerical Life, George 
Eliot, 501. 

Sceptic, The, Ralegh, 38. 

Schiller, Carlyle's Life of, 435; 
quoted, 445. 

Scholar-Gypsy, The, Arnold, 464. 

Scogan, Henry, 2, 15. 

Scott, Walter, on Dryden, 132; on 
Swift, 158; on Burns, 261; his 
power of love, 274; youth, 275, 
276; education, 276-278; personal 
appearance, 278; first love, and 
marriage, 278, 279; Border Min- 
strelsy, 2 79 ; Lay of the Last Minstrel, 
Marmion, Lady of the Lake, 280, 281 ; 
biographies of Dryden and Swifi, 
281; at Abbotsford, 282-284; chil- 
dren, 284; other poems, 285; nov- 
els, 285-288; Life of Napoleon, 2&7\ 
financial loss, 287-289; last days 
and death, 289, 290; his life a justi- 
fication of genius, 290, 291; biblio- 
graphy, 543. 

Secret History of One Year, The, De- 
foe, 149. 

Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin, 455, 456. 

Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin, 
454. 

Shakespeare, William, our know- 
ledge of him not scant, 69; spelling 
of the name, 69 n.; birth, 69; par- 
entage, 70; education, 71, 77; mar- 
riage, 72; children, 72; flight to 
London, 72, 73; theatres and plays 
in the time of, 73-76; and Mar- 
lowe, 75^ 78, 79, 82; at first an 
adapter of old plays, 75, 76; Venus 



INDEX 



567 



and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, 
76; sonnets, 76, 80, 82; acquaint- 
ance with nobles, 77; order of 
plays, 78-80 ; plays not to be taken 
as evidence for his life, 80-82; life 
in London, 82; and Jonson, 82, 84, 
85; as a business man, 83, 84; re- 
tirement to Stratford, 84; death, 
85; personal appearance, 85; why 
called the prince of poets, 86; Mil- 
ton's Epitaph on, 93 ; bibliography, 
641. 

She Stoops to Conquer, Goldsmith, 
242. 

Shelley, P. B., and Byron, 376-379; 
on Byron, 382, 396 ; personality, 
383; birth, 383; education, 384; 
early poetry, 385; his atheism, 386, 
387; and Harriet Westbrook, 388, 
390-392; Queen Mab, 389; and 
Mary Godwin, 390; Alastor, 391, 
395; his humanity, 392, 393; and 
Hunt, 393; writings in 1817-18, 
393; leaves England, 393; travels, 
394, 395; writings at Pisa, 395, 397; 
friends at Pisa, 396; death, 397, 
398; bibliography, 543. 

Shepheard's Calendar, Spenser, 45-48. 

Scherer, on Byron, 361. 

Sibylline Leaves, Coleridge, 325. 

Siege of Corinth, Byron, 371. 

Silas Marner, George Eliot, 502. 

Sketches by Boz, Dickens, 477. 

Sohrab and Rustum, Arnold, 467. 

Some Gospel Truths Opened, Bunyan, 
120. 

Song on a May Morning, Milton, 96. 

Sonnet on a Nightingale, Milton, 96. 

Sordello, Browning, 530. 

Southey, Robert, 315. 

Spain, Ralegh's warfare against, 28- 
32. 

Spanish Gypsy, The, George Eliot, 
504. 

Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 
Contem,porary with Shakespeare, 
Lamb, 339. 

Spectator, The, 182-185. 

Speech on Taxation, Burke, 251. 

Spenser, Edmund, and Ralegh, 28, 
49, 51 ; Faerie Queen, 28, 44, 49-52, 
54; the poets' poet, 44; birth and 
earlyeducation,44— 46; Shepheard's 
Calendar, 45-48; at Cambridge, 46; 
intimacy with Edward Kirke and 
Gabriel Harvey, 46, 47; and the 
court, 48; Mother Hubberd's Tale, 



48, 51 ; in Ireland, 49, 51, 53; minor 
poems, 51 ; marriage, 52 ; sonnets, 
52; death, 53; elements of interest 
in his verse, 54; bibliography, 541. 

Stanley, Dean, Ode on the death of, 
Arnold, 470. 

State of Innocence, Dryden, 130. 

Stebbing, W., on Ralegh, 34, 35. 

Steele, Richard, at Charter House, 
176; at Button's, 179; and the 
Toiler, 182; and the Guardian and 
the Englishman, 185; raised to the 
knighthood, 186; quarrel with 
Addison, 188, 189. 

"Stella," see Johnson, Esther. 

Stephen, Leslie, on Swift, 170; on 
Pope, 196, 205; on Thackeray, 486; 
on George Eliot, 501. 

Sterling, John, 441, 513. 

Stevenson, on Burns, 264, 265. 

Stones of Venice, Ruskin, 454. 

Strafford, Browning, 529. 

Strait Gate, The, Bunyan, 121. 

Strayed Reveller, The, Arnold, 466. 

Strode, friend of Chaucer, 14. 

Suspiria, De Quincey, 356. 

Swift, Jonathan, and Dryden, 138, 
139; on Defoe, 144; his solitariness, 
154; injustice done him by biog- 
raphers, 154-156; and Stella, 155, 
160-163, 168-171; and Hester 
Vanhomrigh, 155, 166, 167; his 
attitude toward women, 155, 159, 
160, 164, 167, 168; birth, 156; edu- 
cation, 157; personal appearance, 
158; at Moor Park, 168-161; at 
Laracor, 161, 162; at London, 162; 
his arrogance and brutality, 163- 
165; Dean of St. Patrick's, 165, 
166; Gulliver's Travels, 170; insan- 
ity, 171; death, 172; on Addison, 
180, 186; on marriage, 372; bibli- 
ography, 542. 

Swinburne, A. C, 619, 520. 

Symonds, J. A., on Shelley, 392. 

Table Talk, Coleridge, 327. 

Taine, H. A., on Swift, 156, 170, 173; 

on Addison, 174; on Pope, 204, 

206. 
Tale of a Tub, A, Swift, 160, 162. 
Tale of Rosamund Gray, A, Lamb, 

338. 
Tales from Shakespeare, Lamb, 338. 
Tatler, the, 182. 

Taxation no Tyranny, Johnson, 227. 
Teares of the Muses, Spenser, 51. 



568 



INDEX 



Tempest, The, Shakespeare, 79. 

Tennyson, Alfred, and Carlyle, 441; 
representative English poet of his 
time, 507, 508; birth and early 
schooling, 508; at Cambridge, 508- 
510; personality, 509, 514; early 
poems, 508, 510; In Memoriam, 
509, 512, 616, 520; in Spain, 510; 
poems published in 1832, 511; 
death of Hallam, 512; from 1832 
to 1842, 612-514; new volume of 
poems, 514; despondency, 515; 
The Princess, 515, 616; marriage, 
516; Poet-Laureate, 516; in Italy, 
617; at Farringford, 517, 619; 
Maud, 517, 518; degree at Oxford, 
618; Idylls of the King, 519, 521; 
visit to the Queen, 520; Enoch 
Arden, 520; dramas, 521; last 
poems, 521, 622; peerage, 622; 
voyage with Gladstone, 522; last 
days and death, 623; bibliography, 
545. 

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 
The, Milton, 106. 

Thackeray, W. M., does injustice to 
Swift, 156, 166; on the nationality 
of Swift, 156; on Swift's attitude 
toward women, 167, 168; on Swift's 
character, 173; on Steele, 176; on 
Addison, 176, 180, 188; on Pope, 
195, 196, 200-202; sensibility, 486; 
birth, 486; education, 486-488; 
on the Continent, 488; early days 
in London, 488, 489; in Paris, 489; 
first writings, 490; illness of wife, 
490; further writings, 491; Vanity 
Fair, 491, 492; Pendennis, Henry 
Esmond, The Newcomes, 492; The 
English Humourists, 492; compared 
with Dickens as a lecturer, 492, 
493; Virginians, 493, 494; in Amer- 
ica, 493, 494; The Four Georges, 494; 
Lovel the Widower, 494; Rounda- 
bout Papers, 494; last works, 495; 
quarrel with Yates and Dickens, 
495; death, 496,496; bibliography, 
544. 

Theatres, in Shakespeare's time, 74. 

Thompson, on Thackeray, 487. 

Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 
Burke, 251. 

Thrales, the, 226-228. 

Throckmorton, Elizabeth, 30. 

Thyrsis, Arnold, 464, 468. 

Tickell, 187, 199. 

Timon of Athens, Shakespeare, 79. 



Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth's poem 

on, 301. 
To Fortune, Coleridge, 313. 
Tottel's Miscellany , 21. 
Tour Through the Whole Island of 

Great Britain, Defoe, 151. 
Traveller, The, Goldsmith, 242. 
Treatise on the Soul, A , Ralegh, 38. 
Trelawny, 378, 380, 381, 384, 398. 
Trevelyan, G. O., on Macaulay, 414, 

416, 419, 422. 
Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer, 11. 
True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, and 

Toleration, Milton, 112. 
True-born Englishman, Defoe, 146. 
Tutchin, John, 144. 
Two Foscari, The, Byron, 378. 

Ulysses, Tennyson, 614, 615. 
Unto this Last, Ruskin, 455, 456. 
Upon the Circumcision, Milton, 96. 

Vanhomrigh, Hester, 165, 166, 167. 
Vanity Fair, Thackeray, 491, 492. 
Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson, 

218. 
Venables, Canon, on Bunyan, 125, 

126. 
Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare, 76. 
Vicar of Wakefield, The, Goldsmith, 

231, 242. 
Victorian Age, 411-413. 
View of the Present State of Ireland, A, 

Spenser, 49, 53. 
Vindication of Gospel Truths Opened, 

A, Bunyan, 121. 
Vindication of Natural Society, 

Burke, 247. 
Virginians, Thackeray, 493, 494. 

Wallenstein, translated by Coleridge, 
321. 

Ward, A. W., on Pope, 209. 

Wendell, B., on the Puritans, 101. 

Wentworth, Thomas, 100, 101. 

Westbrook, Harriet, 388, 390-392. 

Whig Examiner, 185. 

Wild Gallant, The, Dryden, 132. 

Wilhelm Meister, translated by Car- 
lyle, 436. 

Wilson, John, 353. 

Winter's Tale, Shakespeare, 79. 

Wisdom of the Ancients, The, Bacon, 
63. 

Wood, Anthony a, quoted, 24. 

Wordsworth, William, on Shake- 
speare, 80; on Milton, 103; the 



INDEX 



5G9 



meaning of his communing with na- 
ture, 292-295; birth and education, 
295-298; his early interest in na- 
ture, 295-297; on the Continent, 
298; his experience, 298; return to 
nature, 290; new meaning in na- 
ture, 300; early poems, 301; and 
Carlyle, 301, 316-318; at Dove 
Cottage, 302; marriage, 302, 303; 
at Rydal Mount, 303; his personal- 
ity, 303-305; poems, 305, 306, 308; 
Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 



306, 307; Poet-Laureate, 308; death 
308; late recognition of, 308, 309; 
poem on Coleridge and Lamb, 330; 
on Coleridge, 415; bibliography, 
543. 
Wycherley, 193, 196. 

Yates, Edmund, 495. 
Young, Edward, 239. 

Zapolyta, Coleridge, 326. 
Zastrozzi, Shelley, 385. 



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